The purpose of the study was to determine the relationship of student attitude to academic achievement in reading/language, mathematics, science, and social studies while holding gender, grade level, and class size constant.The review of related literature revealed the transition of educational emphasis from positive cognitive outcomes to affective considerations. Research dealing with the effect of the independent variables, gender, grade level, and class size, as well as that showing the impact of attitude toward reading/language, mathematics, science, and social studies as they affected achievement in those subjects was studied.A multiple partial canonical correlation analysis was used to treat the data.POPULATION1. Sample data were collected from thirteen Indianapolis area private Christian schools.2. Three hundred eighty-four subjects were boys and three hundred eighty-three were girls.3. Grade four had one hundred forty-five boys and one hundred forty-three girls. Grade five had one hundred eighteen boys and one hundred sixteen girls while grade six had one hundred twenty boys and one hundred twenty-five girls.4. Forty-nine students were administered the California Achievement Test, one hundred forty-six the Stanford Achievement Test, one hundred forty-eight the Metropolitan Achievement Test, and four hundred twenty-four the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.5. Three hundred seventy-two students were from Baptist schools, fifty-four from Church of Christ schools, seventy-five from Church of God schools, forty-one from Nazarene schools, and two hundred twenty-five from non-church related Christian schools.FINDINGSThe null hypothesis was rejected at the .01 significance level for the California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and the Stanford Achievement Test, and at the .05 significance level for the Metropolitan Achievement Test.CONCLUSIONS1. There is a relationship between student attitude toward reading/language, mathematics, science, and social studies and achievement in reading/language, mathematics, science, and social studies when extraneous variables are partialed out.2. That the relationship is not the result of sample error is implied by the significant X2 tests.

According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), old age is associated with a greater emphasis on self-regulation of emotional states, a focus that fosters a bias in processing positively valenced material in older adults. There is disagreement, however, about whether the “positivity bias” suggested by SST influences performance on memory tasks. Some studies suggest that older adults remember more positive than negative information, or simply less negative information, relative to younger adults, whereas other studies report no such differences. This thesis examined (1) whether variations across studies in encoding instructions or in personal relevance of study materials could account for these inconsistencies, and (2) whether differences in attention at encoding to positive, negative, and neutral stimuli could account for the positivity bias in older adults’ later memory for the stimuli. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults were instructed either to passively view positive, negative, and neutral pictures or to actively categorize them by valence. On a subsequent incidental recall test, older adults recalled equal numbers of positive and negative pictures, whereas younger adults recalled negative pictures best. There was no effect of encoding instructions. Crucially, when pictures were grouped into high and low personal relevance according to participants’ ratings, a positivity bias emerged only for low relevance pictures. In Experiment 2, attention to pictures at encoding was directly manipulated through use of a divided attention paradigm. Although divided attention lowered recall in both age groups, attention did not interact with age and valence. Taken together, the results suggest that variability in the personal relevance of study pictures may be the factor underlying cross-study differences in whether a positivity bias is observed in older adults’ memory.

This thesis looks at a relatively new line of research in Cognitive Science – embodied cognition. Its relation to the computational-representational paradigm, primarily symbolicism, is extensively discussed. It is argued that embodied cognition is compatible with the established paradigm but challenges its research focus and traditionally assumed segregation of cognition from bodily and worldly activities Subsequently the impact of embodied cognition on philosophy of Cognitive Science is considered. The second chapter defends the applicability of mechanistic explanation to cases of embodied cognition. Further, it argues that a proposed alternative, dynamic systems theory, is not a substitute to the mechanistic approach. The last chapter critically examines the thesis that mind is extended beyond the bodily boundary and into the world. It is concluded that arguments in favour of the extended mind thesis are inadequate. Considerations in favour of the orthodox view that the does not “leak” out into the world are also presented.

This thesis investigates the process of communication between a person who has in-depth and technical knowledge about certain items and a person who has very broad and non-technical knowledge. For example, a doctor has detailed knowledge about all types of diseases, whereas, an ordinary person only knows a few common type of them. People use categories to communicate; the language, which is used in communication, is categorical. In addition, knowledge can be expressed in categories, and the categories are formed based on the knowledge that the person has. If the person has a superficial knowledge about a specific subject, he then creates superficial categories; whereas, if he has in-depth knowledge, he creates detailed and technical categories. The communication process between a person with technical categories of knowledge and a person with non-technical categories can be presented by the way that they match their categories. Shared cognition is formed if a category exists or is formed that is completely understandable for both parties. Literature on communication studies have never focused on the way that people with categorical knowledge communicate; therefore, an exploratory study is designed to figure out the process of communication when people have categorical knowledge. The task that is used in this study simulates the situation that two persons with categorical knowledge are communicating. The results of this thesis introduce a new representation for the communication process between a technical and non-technical communicators and the way that shared cognition can be analyzed.

In this study I first examined whether the cognitive processes (hot versus cold cognition) underlying judgments to traditional moral situations are universal to situations that are morally neutral, and whether individual differences in cognitive ability moderate these judgments. Second, I tested whether it was possible to modify the impact of hot versus cold processing systems on judgment deliberation by shifting the focus of attention during the decision-making process. I conclude that moral judgment is not simply the product of cognitive ability and is not sufficiently motivated by hot cognitive experiences alone. The role of cognitive abilities on moral valuation requires further examination.

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the hypothesis that young infants? failures to search for occluded objects arises, not from deficiencies in their object representations, but from limitations in experience with the physical world. Successful means-end search is typically found at 8 months of age and is traditionally taken as the hallmark of object permanence. However, recent evidence suggests that infants much younger than 8 months of age are able to represent and reason about objects that are no longer visible. In Experiment 1, successful means-end search was found for 8. 5-, but not 6. 5-month-old infants in a traditional task, but younger infants showed successful search ability when the task was made familiar to them in Experiment 2 (i. e. , when the toy and occluder are first presented as a single composite object), and when they were given the opportunity to watch a demonstration of the solution to the task in Experiment 3. These results are taken as evidence for the ?experiential limitation? hypothesis and suggest that young infants are more apt at solving manual search tasks than previously acknowledged.

This thesis looks at a relatively new line of research in Cognitive Science – embodied cognition. Its relation to the computational-representational paradigm, primarily symbolicism, is extensively discussed. It is argued that embodied cognition is compatible with the established paradigm but challenges its research focus and traditionally assumed segregation of cognition from bodily and worldly activities Subsequently the impact of embodied cognition on philosophy of Cognitive Science is considered. The second chapter defends the applicability of mechanistic explanation to cases of embodied cognition. Further, it argues that a proposed alternative, dynamic systems theory, is not a substitute to the mechanistic approach. The last chapter critically examines the thesis that mind is extended beyond the bodily boundary and into the world. It is concluded that arguments in favour of the extended mind thesis are inadequate. Considerations in favour of the orthodox view that the does not “leak” out into the world are also presented.

This thesis investigates the process of communication between a person who has in-depth and technical knowledge about certain items and a person who has very broad and non-technical knowledge. For example, a doctor has detailed knowledge about all types of diseases, whereas, an ordinary person only knows a few common type of them. People use categories to communicate; the language, which is used in communication, is categorical. In addition, knowledge can be expressed in categories, and the categories are formed based on the knowledge that the person has. If the person has a superficial knowledge about a specific subject, he then creates superficial categories; whereas, if he has in-depth knowledge, he creates detailed and technical categories. The communication process between a person with technical categories of knowledge and a person with non-technical categories can be presented by the way that they match their categories. Shared cognition is formed if a category exists or is formed that is completely understandable for both parties. Literature on communication studies have never focused on the way that people with categorical knowledge communicate; therefore, an exploratory study is designed to figure out the process of communication when people have categorical knowledge. The task that is used in this study simulates the situation that two persons with categorical knowledge are communicating. The results of this thesis introduce a new representation for the communication process between a technical and non-technical communicators and the way that shared cognition can be analyzed.

The human being, the most magnificent autonomous entity in the universe, frequently takes the decision of `what to look at' in their day-to-day life without even realizing the complexities of the underlying process. When it comes to the design of such an attention system for autonomous robots, all of a sudden this apparently simple task appears to be an extremely complex one with highly dynamic interaction among motor skills, knowledge and experience developed throughout the life-time, highly connected circuitry of the visual cortex, and super-fast timing. The most fascinating thing about visual attention system of the primates is that the underlying mechanism is not precisely known yet. Different influential theories and hypothesis regarding this mechanism, however, are being proposed in psychology and neuroscience. These theories and hypothesis have encouraged the research on synthetic modeling of visual attention in computer vision, computational neuroscience and, very recently, in AI robotics. The major motivation behind the computational modeling of visual attention is two-fold: understanding the mechanism underlying the cognition of the primates' and using the principle of focused attention in different real-world applications, e.g. in computer vision, surveillance, and robotics. Accordingly, we observe the rise of two different trends in the computational modeling of visual attention. The first one is mostly focused on developing mathematical models which mimic, as much as possible, the details of the primates' attention system: the structure, the connectivity among visual neurons and different regions of the visual cortex, the flow of information etc. Such models provide a way to test the theories of the primates' visual attention with minimal involvement from the live subjects. This is a magnificent way to use technological advancement for the understanding of human cognition. The second trend in computational modeling, on the other hand, uses the methodological sophistication of the biological processes (like visual attention) to advance the technology. These models are mostly concerned with developing a technical system of visual attention which can be used in real-world applications where the principle of focused attention might play a significant role for redundant information management. This thesis is focused on developing a computational model of visual attention for robotic cognition and, therefore, belongs to the second trend. The design of a visual attention model for robotic systems as a component of their cognition comes with a number of challenges which, generally, do not appear in the traditional computer vision applications of visual attention. The robotic models of visual attention, although heavily inspired by the rich literature of visual attention in computer vision, adopt different measures to cope with these challenges. This thesis proposes a Bayesian model of visual attention designed specifically for robotic systems and, therefore, tackles the challenges involved with robotic visual attention. The operation of the proposed model is guided by the theory of biased competition, a popular theory from cognitive neuroscience describing the mechanism of primates' visual attention. The proposed Bayesian attention model offers a robot-centric approach of visual attention where the head-pose of a robot in the 3D world is estimated recursively such that the robot can focus on the most behaviorally relevant stimuli in its environment. The behavioral relevance of an object determined based on two criteria which are inspired by the postulates of the biased competitive hypothesis of visual attention in the primates. Accordingly, the proposed model encourages a robot to focus on novel stimuli or stimuli that have similarity with a `sought for' object depending on the context. In order to address a number of robot-specific issues of visual attention, the proposed model is further extended to the multi-modal case where speech commands from the human are used to modulate the visual attention behavior of the robot. The Bayes model of visual attention, inherited from the Bayesian sensor fusion characteristic, naturally accommodates multi-modal information during attention selection. This enables the proposed model to be the core component of an attention oriented speech-based human-robot interaction framework. Extensive experiments are performed in the real-world to investigate different aspects of the proposed Bayesian visual attention model.

China Steel Corporation (CSC) has always kept the excellent organization performance and had very low turnover rate since it was established in 1973. In order to keep the competition, CSC performs the organization change from 2002 and plans to reduce 15% employees in 2006. The goals of this study are as follows: 1. To realize the degrees of CSC employees¡¦ job satisfaction and organizational commitment. 2. To analyze the relationship of CSC employees¡¦ cognition and attitude toward the organizational change. 3. To research on the relationship of CSC employees¡¦ job satisfaction and organizational commitment toward the attitude of change. 4. To analyze the relationship of CSC employees¡¦ personal background and the attitude of change. After this study analysis, the conclusion is made as follows: 1. The degree of CSC employees¡¦ job satisfaction (average score is 3.49, standard deviation (SD)is 0.55) is not so high as expected. The degree of CSC employees¡¦ organizational commitment (average score is 3.78, SD is 0.51) is higher than the degree of job satisfaction. The employees¡¦ job satisfaction and organizational commitment are related significantly and positively. 2. In general, it does not show that whether the CSC employees strongly support the organizational change or not. The average scores of cognition and attitude toward to the organizational change are 3.07(SD 0.54), 3.02(SD 0.68) respectively. The cognition and attitude toward the organizational change are related significantly and positively. 3. The employees¡¦ job satisfaction and organizational commitment are related significantly and positively to the attitude. But, regression analysis shows that the employees¡¦ job satisfaction and organizational commitment do not have influence to the attitude. 4. For the employees¡¦ personal background, there are three variables, education degree, job position and age which have influence to the attitude. The education degree and job position have positive influence. Only the age is negative influence.