The inverse base-rate effect is the observation that on certain occasions people classify new objects as belonging to rare base-rate categories rather than common ones (e.g., D. L. Medin & S. M. Edelson, 1988). This finding is inconsistent with normative prescriptions of rationality, and provides an anomaly for current theories of human knowledge representation, such as the exemplar-based models of categorization, which predict a consistent use of base-rates (e.g., D. L. Medin & M. M. Schaffer, 1978). This thesis presents a novel explanation of the inverse base-rate effect. The proposal is that participants sometimes eliminate category options that are inconsistent with well-supported inference rules. These assumptions contrast with those by attentional theory (J. K. Kruschke, in press), according to which the inverse base-rate effect is the outcome of rapid attention shifts operating on cue-category associations. Study I, II, and III verified seven qualitative predictions derived from the eliminative inference idea. None of these phenomena can be explained by attentional theory. The most important of these findings were that elimination of well-known, common categories mediate the inverse base-rate effect rather than the strongest cue-category associations (Study I), that only participants with a rule-based mode of generalization exhibit the inverse base-rate effect (Study II), and that rapid attentional shifts per se do not accelerate learning, but rather decelerate it (Study III). In addition, Study I provided a quantitative implementation of the eliminative inference idea, ELMO, that demonstrated that this high-level reasoning process can produce the basic pattern of base-rate effects in the inverse base-rate design. Taken together, as an account of the inverse base-rate effect the empirical evidence of this thesis suggest that rule-based elimination is a powerful component of the inverse base-rate effect. But previous studies have indicated that attentional shifts affect the inverse base-rate effect, too. Therefore, a complete account of the inverse base-rate effect needs to integrate inductive and eliminative inferences operating on rule-based representations with attentional shifts. The Discussion of this thesis propose a number of suggestions for such integrative work.

Syftet med avhandlingen är att ge en ”inifrån-beskrivning” av hur skolan organiserar verksamheten för elever i en särskild undervisningsgrupp. Vidare undersöker jag hur elever, pedagoger, föräldrar och elevernas tidigare klasslärare beskriver vad som utgör elevernas skolsvårigheter, i forskningsintervjuer. Slutligen belyser jag hur pedagogerna utvärderar elevernas skolproblem i en schemalagd utvärderingsaktivitet. Studien är baserad på ett fältarbete under ett år, i kombination med inspelningar av vardagliga aktiviteter och intervjuer med fem elever (7-12 år), pedagoger, föräldrar och f.d. klasslärare. I analyserna används en etnometodologisk ansats. Resultaten visar att den särskilda undervisningsgruppen osynliggörs och marginaliseras både centralt inom kommunen och lokalt i skolans verksamhet. Genomgående har eleverna lågt aktörskap i vardagliga skolaktiviteter. Ett annat resultat är att pedagogerna ständigt beskriver elevernas skolsvårigheter. Pedagogerna använder ett flertal vetenskapliga diskurser som uppgraderar och befäster problemidentiteter. Detta kan förklaras i ljuset av att det finns en osäkerhet om vilka elevernas problem är. Eleverna å sin sida positionerar sig som aktiva aktörer, och gör motstånd mot problemdefinitionerna. Eleverna undviker att formulera problem, nedgraderar tillskrivna problem och tar inte upp pedagogernas råd. Eleverna tar även alla chanser att tillskriva andra elever problem, på så vis positionera de sig som duktiga elever, vilket tolkas som ett sätt att upprätthålla självrespekt. Min avhandling understryker vikten av att i detalj studera elever i särskilda undervisningsgrupper och deras sociala kompetenser och aktörskap i vardagliga skolaktiviteter. Analysen pekar på att beskrivningar inte är neutrala, utan är sociala aktiviteter där identiteter, normer, social ordning, moraliska versioner och relationer, samt institutioner, etableras och görs motstånd mot. / The aim of the present doctoral thesis is to give an ”inside” description of how schools organize activities for students who do not fit into regular public education. Further, I explore how students, pedagogues, parents and former teachers account for the students’ school problems in research interviews. Finally, I investigate teachers’ assessments of students’ school problems in a scheduled daily evaluation activity. Data are drawn from a one-year ethnographic study, combined with recordings of everyday activities and interviews with five students (7-12 years), parents, pedagogues and former teachers. The analysis demonstrates that the special teaching group is made invisible and marginalized on different levels, both centrally in the municipality and in the context of local school activities. Students consistently show low participation and agency in their everyday activities. Another finding shows that pedagogues are constantly assessing students’ school problems, making this a central everyday activity. In so doing, the pedagogues also upgrade the students’ school problems, drawing on various scientific discourses. This can be explained in light of the insecurity that exists regarding what the students’ problems actually are. On the other hand, the students position themselves as active agents and resist problem definitions. The students avoid the pedagogues’ definitions, downgrading ascribed problems and reformulating them. Further, the students take all chances to attribute problems to other students. In this way, they position themselves as able students, which can be interpreted as a way of maintaining self-respect. Overall, the present findings underscore the need for detailed analysis of children’s social competence and agency in their everyday life in special teaching groups. My analysis demonstrates that descriptions are not neutral, but instead social activities in which identities, norms, social orders, moral versions, relationships and even institutions are established and resisted.

Est-ce que les animaux pensent? Quelle est la nature des mécanismes qui dirigent leurs comportements? Peut-on comparer ces mécanismes au fonctionnement de l'esprit humain? Ces questions animent les débats scientifiques, philosophiques et théologiques depuis des millénaires. L'idée d'une discontinuité fondamentale entre l'esprit humain et les rouages de l'animal-machine, prônée par Descartes, s'oppose à l'hypothèse de continuité de Darwin selon laquelle la différence entre les capacités mentales de l'homme et de l'animal serait de degré et non de nature. Dans cette thèse, fort des récentes avancées méthodo-logiques et théoriques dans l'étude du comportement animal et des neurosciences, nous partons à la recherche de la pierre de Rosette pouvant éclairer ce débat: l'homologie neuro-cognitive fonctionnelle. Existe-t-il un fonctionnement nerveux commun à plusieurs espèces (et notamment à l'homme), supportant un même fonctionnement cognitif? Nous focalisons notre recherche sur l'une des fonctions clefs de l'esprit humain, qui semble aussi très répandue dans le monde animal : la catégorisation. Former des concepts - regrouper mentalement les objets ou événements auxquelles nous sommes confrontés en catégories - permet de simplifier, de donner un sens et de réagir de manière appropriée aux flux perceptuels incessants issus de nos sens. En testant des sujets humains et macaques dans un protocole rigoureusement identique de catégorisation visuelle rapide, en particulier en contrôlant l'influence de l'information contextuelle de la scène visuelle sur les performances de catégorisation de l'objet, nous montrons ici que les deux espèces de primates semblent bien avoir recours à des représentations ou concepts visuels similaires pour résoudre cette tâche. Mieux, le développement de nouvelles méthodes d'analyses multivariées des potentiels de champs corticaux nous permet de lire, essai par essai, l'émergence de représentations neuronales associées à cette tâche de catégorisation. En appliquant ces méthodes chez le singe, en EEG de surface chez l'homme et chez des patients épileptiques implantés pour raison médicale, on met en évidence le rôle analogue, chez ces deux espèces de primates, de la voie visuelle ventrale dans la formation ultra-rapide de ces représentations catégorielles. Pour résumer, la capacité de catégorisation visuelle rapide semble être un trait neurocognitif partagé par l'homme et le macaque, probablement héritée d'un ancêtre commun. L'existence d'une telle homologie est un argument pour l'hypothèse de continuité et permet donc d'envisager une évolution de la cognition. Enfin, si l'on considère la catégorisation comme un élément clef de la pensée humaine, alors ces résultats suggèrent l'existence d'une pensée chez le macaque, dont au moins une partie fonctionne comme la nôtre.

Object categorization is one of the fundamental topics in computer vision research. Most current work in object categorization aims to discriminate among generic object classes with gross differences. However, many applications require much finer distinctions. This thesis focuses on the design, evaluation and analysis of learning algorithms for fine- grained object classification. The contributions of the thesis are three-fold. First, we introduce two databases of high-resolution images of arthropod specimens we collected to promote the development of highly accurate fine-grained recognition methods. Second, we give a literature review on the development of Bag-of-words (BOW) approaches to image classification and present the stacked evidence tree approach we developed for the fine-grained classification task. We draw connections and analyze differences between those two genres of approaches, which leads to a better understanding about the design of image classification approaches. Third, benchmark results on our two datasets are pre- sented. We further analyze the influence of two important variables on the performance of fine-grained classification. The experiments corroborate our hypotheses that a) high resolution images and b) more aggressive information extraction, such as finer descriptor encoding with large dictionaries or classifiers based on raw descriptors, is required to achieve good fine-grained categorization accuracy. / Graduation date: 2013

本文從差別取價之觀點切入，討論目前具價格僵固性之表演藝術產業的票房收入情形，在消費者受多種因素影響其購票決策時，廠商如何採取最適因應策略、以使營收極大化。本文以折價票及座位調整作為廠商策略，建立一經濟模型探討在不同座位種類、座位品質、及外在條件時，廠商採取各策略之最適反應。 從結果我們發現，就座位調整來說，當為兩種價區時，只有當外在條件好時增加高價區可增加營收，在其他外在條件下則不然；而若增加為三種價區座位，除特定區間外，所有的外在條件與座位品質組合皆能找到一增加營收的最適座位調整方式。而另一方面就折價票之效果，則是不論條件為何、皆不能增加營收。

Due to the daily rapid growth of the information, there are considerable needs to extract and discover valuable knowledge from data sources such as the World Wide Web. Most of the common techniques in text mining are based on the statistical analysis of a term either word or phrase. These techniques consider documents as bags of words and pay no attention to the meanings of the document content. In addition, statistical analysis of a term frequency captures the importance of the term within a document only. However, two terms can have the same frequency in their documents, but one term contributes more to the meaning of its sentences than the other term. Therefore, there is an intensive need for a model that captures the meaning of linguistic utterances in a formal structure. The underlying model should indicate terms that capture the semantics of text. In this case, the model can capture terms that present the concepts of the sentence, which leads to discover the topic of the document. A new concept-based model that analyzes terms on the sentence, document and corpus levels rather than the traditional analysis of document only is introduced. The concept-based model can effectively discriminate between non-important terms with respect to sentence semantics and terms which hold the concepts that represent the sentence meaning. The proposed model consists of concept-based statistical analyzer, conceptual ontological graph representation, concept extractor and concept-based similarity measure. The term which contributes to the sentence semantics is assigned two different weights by the concept-based statistical analyzer and the conceptual ontological graph representation. These two weights are combined into a new weight. The concepts that have maximum combined weights are selected by the concept extractor. The similarity between documents is calculated based on a new concept-based similarity measure. The proposed similarity measure takes full advantage of using the concept analysis measures on the sentence, document, and corpus levels in calculating the similarity between documents. Large sets of experiments using the proposed concept-based model on different datasets in text clustering, categorization and retrieval are conducted. The experiments demonstrate extensive comparison between traditional weighting and the concept-based weighting obtained by the concept-based model. Experimental results in text clustering, categorization and retrieval demonstrate the substantial enhancement of the quality using: (1) concept-based term frequency (tf), (2) conceptual term frequency (ctf), (3) concept-based statistical analyzer, (4) conceptual ontological graph, (5) concept-based combined model. In text clustering, the evaluation of results is relied on two quality measures, the F-Measure and the Entropy. In text categorization, the evaluation of results is relied on three quality measures, the Micro-averaged F1, the Macro-averaged F1 and the Error rate. In text retrieval, the evaluation of results relies on three quality measures, the precision at 10 documents retrieved P(10), the preference measure (bpref), and the mean uninterpolated average precision (MAP). All of these quality measures are improved when the newly developed concept-based model is used to enhance the quality of the text clustering, categorization and retrieval.

Due to the daily rapid growth of the information, there are considerable needs to extract and discover valuable knowledge from data sources such as the World Wide Web. Most of the common techniques in text mining are based on the statistical analysis of a term either word or phrase. These techniques consider documents as bags of words and pay no attention to the meanings of the document content. In addition, statistical analysis of a term frequency captures the importance of the term within a document only. However, two terms can have the same frequency in their documents, but one term contributes more to the meaning of its sentences than the other term. Therefore, there is an intensive need for a model that captures the meaning of linguistic utterances in a formal structure. The underlying model should indicate terms that capture the semantics of text. In this case, the model can capture terms that present the concepts of the sentence, which leads to discover the topic of the document. A new concept-based model that analyzes terms on the sentence, document and corpus levels rather than the traditional analysis of document only is introduced. The concept-based model can effectively discriminate between non-important terms with respect to sentence semantics and terms which hold the concepts that represent the sentence meaning. The proposed model consists of concept-based statistical analyzer, conceptual ontological graph representation, concept extractor and concept-based similarity measure. The term which contributes to the sentence semantics is assigned two different weights by the concept-based statistical analyzer and the conceptual ontological graph representation. These two weights are combined into a new weight. The concepts that have maximum combined weights are selected by the concept extractor. The similarity between documents is calculated based on a new concept-based similarity measure. The proposed similarity measure takes full advantage of using the concept analysis measures on the sentence, document, and corpus levels in calculating the similarity between documents. Large sets of experiments using the proposed concept-based model on different datasets in text clustering, categorization and retrieval are conducted. The experiments demonstrate extensive comparison between traditional weighting and the concept-based weighting obtained by the concept-based model. Experimental results in text clustering, categorization and retrieval demonstrate the substantial enhancement of the quality using: (1) concept-based term frequency (tf), (2) conceptual term frequency (ctf), (3) concept-based statistical analyzer, (4) conceptual ontological graph, (5) concept-based combined model. In text clustering, the evaluation of results is relied on two quality measures, the F-Measure and the Entropy. In text categorization, the evaluation of results is relied on three quality measures, the Micro-averaged F1, the Macro-averaged F1 and the Error rate. In text retrieval, the evaluation of results relies on three quality measures, the precision at 10 documents retrieved P(10), the preference measure (bpref), and the mean uninterpolated average precision (MAP). All of these quality measures are improved when the newly developed concept-based model is used to enhance the quality of the text clustering, categorization and retrieval.

The aim of this study was to investigate the development of release from proactive interference (RPI) and its relations with executive working memory functions. 101 primary school children (aged 6-12 years) and 20 young adults (aged 22-30 years) participated in the study. The main task, the Categorical Free Recall Test, comprised 12 items from 3 different categories (animals, fruits, clothes). The purpose of the main task was to examine both the development of the RPI pattern and the categorization ability during childhood. As our results showed, the categorization ability and the RPI pattern were already present in the 1st graders. Although overall memory span increased with age, there was no significant development for the categorization and the RPI effect. For the additional tasks, the Word Span Test (WST, to measure the phonological WM capacity), the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST, to measure both the categorization ability and executive WM functions), and the Listening Span Test (LST, to examine executive and complex WM functions), the results indicated that children also improved with age. Overall memory capacity in the main task was best predicted by the WST / however, memory of serial position was best predicted by the LST. These findings are in accordance with the view that the WST measures the phonological working memory span, whereas the LST measures complex working memory and executive functions. The comparisons between the adult and the child sample revealed that except for the RPI pattern adults were better on all tasks than the children. The lack of a consistent RPI pattern for the adults may be due to the relatively short stimulus list.

<p>Syftet med avhandlingen är att ge en ”inifrån-beskrivning” av hur skolan organiserar verksamheten för elever i en särskild undervisningsgrupp. Vidare undersöker jag hur elever, pedagoger, föräldrar och elevernas tidigare klasslärare beskriver vad som utgör elevernas skolsvårigheter, i forskningsintervjuer. Slutligen belyser jag hur pedagogerna utvärderar elevernas skolproblem i en schemalagd utvärderingsaktivitet. Studien är baserad på ett fältarbete under ett år, i kombination med inspelningar av vardagliga aktiviteter och intervjuer med fem elever (7-12 år), pedagoger, föräldrar och f.d. klasslärare. I analyserna används en etnometodologisk ansats.</p><p>Resultaten visar att den särskilda undervisningsgruppen osynliggörs och marginaliseras både centralt inom kommunen och lokalt i skolans verksamhet. Genomgående har eleverna lågt aktörskap i vardagliga skolaktiviteter. Ett annat resultat är att pedagogerna ständigt beskriver elevernas skolsvårigheter. Pedagogerna använder ett flertal vetenskapliga diskurser som uppgraderar och befäster problemidentiteter. Detta kan förklaras i ljuset av att det finns en osäkerhet om vilka elevernas problem är. Eleverna å sin sida positionerar sig som aktiva aktörer, och gör motstånd mot problemdefinitionerna. Eleverna undviker att formulera problem, nedgraderar tillskrivna problem och tar inte upp pedagogernas råd. Eleverna tar även alla chanser att tillskriva andra elever problem, på så vis positionera de sig som duktiga elever, vilket tolkas som ett sätt att upprätthålla självrespekt.</p><p>Min avhandling understryker vikten av att i detalj studera elever i särskilda undervisningsgrupper och deras sociala kompetenser och aktörskap i vardagliga skolaktiviteter. Analysen pekar på att beskrivningar inte är neutrala, utan är sociala aktiviteter där identiteter, normer, social ordning, moraliska versioner och relationer, samt institutioner, etableras och görs motstånd mot.</p> / <p>The aim of the present doctoral thesis is to give an ”inside” description of how schools organize activities for students who do not fit into regular public education. Further, I explore how students, pedagogues, parents and former teachers account for the students’ school problems in research interviews. Finally, I investigate teachers’ assessments of students’ school problems in a scheduled daily evaluation activity. Data are drawn from a one-year ethnographic study, combined with recordings of everyday activities and interviews with five students (7-12 years), parents, pedagogues and former teachers.</p><p>The analysis demonstrates that the special teaching group is made invisible and marginalized on different levels, both centrally in the municipality and in the context of local school activities. Students consistently show low participation and agency in their everyday activities. Another finding shows that pedagogues are constantly assessing students’ school problems, making this a central everyday activity. In so doing, the pedagogues also upgrade the students’ school problems, drawing on various scientific discourses. This can be explained in light of the insecurity that exists regarding what the students’ problems actually are. On the other hand, the students position themselves as active agents and resist problem definitions. The students avoid the pedagogues’ definitions, downgrading ascribed problems and reformulating them. Further, the students take all chances to attribute problems to other students. In this way, they position themselves as able students, which can be interpreted as a way of maintaining self-respect.</p><p>Overall, the present findings underscore the need for detailed analysis of children’s social competence and agency in their everyday life in special teaching groups. My analysis demonstrates that descriptions are not neutral, but instead social activities in which identities, norms, social orders, moral versions, relationships and even institutions are established and resisted.</p>

This thesis explores how the Swedish legal system, specifically the police and district courts, understand and construct cases of human trafficking for sexual purposes and procuring with under-age victims. It draws on police investigative interviews and court decisions in 22 pronounced district court sentences, involving 36 female youths. Theoretically the thesis primarily builds on social constructionism and the sociology of childhood. Methodologically it builds on coding of forensic interviews, narrative analysis and discourse analysis. Study I explores the informativeness of 24 of the 36 adolescents when interviewed by the police. It shows that the adolescents were informative yet evasive, specifically when asked open questions. Experiences of violence and force as well as interviews conducted soon after the police intervention further contributed to evasiveness. Also evasiveness seemed intimately connected to circumstances in each unique case. Study II scrutinises the image of the ideal trafficking victim by asking how the issue of responsibility is handled when police interviews turn to prostitution. It also analyses which interactive and narrative conditions, related to agency and stake, apply for talk in this specific institutional setting. The findings suggest that in order to sort out the ‘real’ victims, the interrogator needs to pull apart the two categories ‘victim’ and ‘prostitute’ even if there may be problems with this clear-cut distinction since the categories tend to blend together. Further, in this institutional setting to talk about sex can be problematic as it may undermine the victim narrative instead creating a subject with interests. Study III explores how Swedish district courts assess the credibility of alleged victims of human trafficking for sexual purposes and the reliability of their testimonies. The findings indicate that the judges base their assessments on the Swedish Supreme Courts’ criteria of how to understand reliability and credibility but they seemed also to be influenced by extra-legal factors relating to victims’ behaviour. Further, the findings imply that the judges used the Supreme Court’s criteria to argue both for and against credibility. By so doing, their arguments supported the decision reached irrespective of how the adolescents reported or what impression they made. In brief this thesis can be said to point to a legal dilemma when law on paper is applied in practice as each unique adolescent must be recognized by the authorities as fitting the administrative category ‘victim’. When put into practice, categories are rarely neat and clear hence such categorizing becomes a phenomenon negotiated in interaction. Also, this legal context sets up limits and possibilities for the adolescents’ agency and this too can be said to have a bearing on if she is, or is not, constructed as a victim. In short, this thesis shows certain conditions of victimhood. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted.</p><p>Forskningsfinansiär: Brottsoffermyndigheten genom Brottsofferfonden.</p> / Människohandel/koppleri med barn och unga för sexuella ändamål Vad går att lära av rättsväsendet och brottsoffrens erfarenheter?