An assumption in Cognitive Psychology, which has been challenged in recent years, is that the systems responsible for action and perception work independently of one another. These systems work together during conceptual tasks and research has demonstrated that action knowledge can influence performance even when the task is 'action-irrelevant' (Borghi, 2004; Borghi, Flumini, Natraj & Wheaton, 2012; Creem & Proffitt, 2001; Tucker & Ellis, 1998, 2001). However, participants in such tasks are often only asked to make simple category judgements, such as natural versus man made. The research reported in this thesis has shown that, under certain conditions, participants use action knowledge to make 'complex' category choices in an action-irrelevant task. The experimental work has predominantly used the forced-choice triad task to assess the circumstances under which participants categorise objects based on shared actions. The triads were designed with a target object and two choice objects matching on either shared actions (rifle + water pistol), shared taxonomic relations (rifle + sword), or both (orange + banana). The context in which the objects were presented was also manipulated so that the objects were either presented on a white background (context-lean) or being used by an agent (context-rich). Participants were most likely to select the choice object that shared both a taxonomic and an action demonstrating that action has an 'additive' effect in categorical decisions. Presenting the objects being used by an agent in a functional scenario increased the saliency of the shared actions between the stimuli, and participants were more likely to select the action choice. The subsequent experimental work reported in the thesis sought to eliminate potential confounding variables including perceptual features, object typicality and task instructions. What the experimental work presented here has demonstrated is that action can influence decisions on more complex categories, and judgments of similarity. The research has identified three main circumstances under which knowledge of action becomes influential in the triad task designed for the purpose of this research as follows: (i) when it is presented in conjunction with taxonomic information, (ii) when it is presented with a context, and (iii) when participants are first asked to physically interact with the objects.

Although scholars have begun to identify individual level predictors of panethnic group consciousness, we still do not have a full understanding of how it develops among Latinos (Padilla1985; Masuoka, 2006, 2008). This study seeks to add to the literature by determining if contextual factors affect panethnic group consciousness. Does the presence of many different Latino country of origin groups affect the development of Latino group consciousness? Relying on previously literature on intergroup relations, I argue that Latino intra-group diversity will lead to two possible outcomes. First, as Latinos of different country of origins subgroups come into more frequent contact this will have a positive effect on panethnic group consciousness because individuals would have developed shared experiences. An alternative possibility is that dominant subgroups (Mexican, Cubans and Puerto Ricans) will react negatively to an increase in out-subgroups due to perceived threat. This in turn would undermine Latino group consciousness. The 2006 Latino National Survey and the 2005-2007 American Community Survey were used to test the proposed relationship between context and group consciousness. Findings suggest that contextual factors do have an effect on group consciousness but only for certain components and country of origin groups.

Privacy has been an academic concern, ethical issue and legislative conundrum. No other factors have shaped the understanding of privacy as much as the development of technologies – be it the invention of press machines, telephones or cameras. With the diffusion of mobile Internet, social media, the Internet of Things and the penetration of devices such as smartphones, the global positioning system, surveillance cameras, sensors and radio frequency identification tags, Big Data, designed to economically extract value from a huge amount and variety of data, has been accumulating exponentially since 2012. Data-driven businesses collect, combine, use, share and analyze consumers’ personal information for business revenues. Consumers’ shopping habits, viewing habits, browsing history and many other online behaviors have been commodified. Never before in history had privacy been threatened by the latest communication technologies as it is today. This dissertation aims to study some of the rising issues of technology and businesses that relate to privacy in China, a rising economic power of the East. China is a country with Confucian heritage and governed under decades of Communist leadership. Its philosophical traditions and social fabric have shaped the perception of privacy since more than 2,000 years ago. “Private” was not taken as negative but being committed to the public or the greater good was an expected virtue in ancient China. The country also has a long tradition of peer surveillance whether it was under the baojia system or the later-on Urban and Rural Residents’ Committees. But after China adopted the reform and open-up policy in 1978, consumerism has inspired the new Chinese middle class to pursue more private space as a lifestyle. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent are globally top-ranking Chinese Internet companies with huge numbers of users, tractions and revenues, whose businesses depend heavily on consumers’ personal data. As a response to the increase of consumer data and the potential intrusion of privacy by Internet and information service providers (IISPs), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a regulator of China’s Internet industry, enacted laws to regulate the collection and use of personal information by the IISPs. Drawing upon the literature and privacy theories of Westin, Altman and Nissenbaum and the cultural theory of Hofstede, this study investigated the compliance of Chinese businesses’ privacy policies with relevant Chinese laws and the information provided in the privacy policies regarding the collection, use and disclosure of Internet users’ personal information; Chinese consumers’ privacy attitudes and actions, including the awareness, concerns, control, trust and trade-offs related to privacy; the differences among Chinese Fundamentalists, Pragmatists and Unconcerned using Core Privacy Orientation Index; and the conceptualization of privacy in present China. A triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods such as case study, content analysis, online survey and semantic network analysis were employed to answer research questions and test hypotheses. This study found Chinese IISPs represented by Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent comply well with Chinese laws. Tencent provides the most information about the collection, use and disclosure of consumers’ personal information. Chinese consumers know little about Big Data technologies in terms of collecting their personal information. They have the most concerns about other individuals and the least about the government when their personal information is accessed without their knowledge. When their personal information is collected by online businesses, Chinese consumers’ have more concerns about their online chats, their images and emails and the fewer concerns about searches performed, websites browsed, shopping and viewing habits. Less than one-third of Chinese surveyed take pro-active measures to manage online privacy settings. Chinese consumers make more efforts to avoid being tracked by people who might criticize, harass, or target them; advertisers and hackers or criminals. They rarely make themselves invisible from government, law enforcement persons or people they are familiar with such as people from their past, family members and romantic partners. Chinese consumers are more trusting of the laws and regulations issued by the government than they are of online businesses to protect personal data. Chinese only trade privacy for benefits occasionally but when they see more benefits from privacy trade-offs, they have fewer concerns. To Chinese consumers, privacy means personal information, including but not limited to, family, home address, phone number, Chinese ID number, password to bank accounts and other online accounts, the leaking and disclosure of which without the owners’ consent to people whom they do not want the information to be known will result in a sense of insecurity.

The purpose of the study is to explore the context, from the users’ perspective, in order to find relevant context parameters that can be useful in the development of the future context-aware technology. The goal is to find some of the context parameters relevant to the situated activity and investigate to what extent and in which way they influence the user in everyday planning activities. The method used in the study was based on scenario descriptions. A total of 41 participants reported how they would have acted in the different situations and they also rated how important they believed the different context factors were in the situations. Analyses were made to reveal relationships between context factors and service properties used by the participants in the scenarios. In the study several interesting relationships between context factors and the use of services were discovered. The level of urgency was in several situations considered to be important, and it was also found to have an impact on how the participants chose to communicate. The cost was introduced by the participants during the study. It seemed to be important; however, in situations with high urgency it became less important. The study revealed a potential relationship between the risk of disturbing the people in the vicinity and the effort to communicate quietly. Another interesting finding was the relationship between privacy and the choice of modality when communicating: voice-based services were avoided. Further, the importance of privacy and disturbance also appeared to have greater influence in non-anonymous situations than in anonymous. / Syftet med studien är att undersöka kontexten, utifrån användarens perspektiv, för att kunna hitta relevanta kontextfaktorer som kan vara användbara i utvecklingen av kontextmedveten teknologi. Målet är att finna kontextfaktorer som är relevanta för den pågående aktiviteten och undersöka i vilken utsträckning och på vilka sätt dessa faktorer påverkar användaren i de dagliga planeringsaktiviteterna. Metoden som användes i studien baserades på scenariobeskrivningar. 41 stycken försöksdeltagare fick beskriva hur de skulle ha handlat i de olika situationerna och de fick också skatta hur viktiga de olika kontextfaktorerena var i situationerna. Analyser genomfördes för att finna samband mellan kontextfaktorer och egenskaper hos de tjänster som försöksdeltagarna använde sig av i scenarierna. I studien upptäcktes en rad intressanta relationer mellan kontextfaktorer och användningen av tjänster. Exempelvis ansågs nivån av brådska vara betydelsefull i flera situationer och den verkade också ha inverkan på hur försöksdeltagarna valde att kommunicera. Försöksdeltagarna introducerade under studien kontextfaktorn kostnad. Kostnaden påverkade valet av tjänster men blev mindre betydande i situationer med stor brådska. Studien visade också på potentiella samband mellan risken att störa människor i sin omgivning och viljan att kommunicera tyst. En annan intressant upptäckt var sambandet mellan avskildhet och kommunikationssätt: röstbaserade tjänster undveks när andra människor fanns i närheten. Dessutom verkade det som om det var viktigare att värna om sin avskildhet och att inte störa andra i ickeanonyma situationer än i situationer där man var helt anonym.

Information is useless unless it is used whilst still applicable. Having a system that notifies the user of important messages using the most appropriate medium and device will benefit users that rely on time critical information. There are several existing systems and models for mobile notification as well as for adaptive mobile notification using context awareness. Current models and systems are typically designed for a specific set of mobile devices, modes and services. Communication however, can take place in many different modes, across many different devices and may originate from many different sources. The aim of this research was to develop a model for adaptive mobile notification using context awareness. An extensive literature study was performed into existing models for adaptive mobile notification systems using context awareness. The literature study identified several potential models but no way to evaluate and compare the models. A set of requirements to evaluate these models was developed and the models were evaluated against these criteria. The model satisfying the most requirements was adapted so as to satisfy the remaining criteria. The proposed model is extensible in terms of the modes, devices and notification sources supported. The proposed model determines the importance of a message, the appropriate device and mode (or modes) of communication based on the user‘s context, and alerts the user of the message using these modes. A prototype was developed as a proof-of-concept of the proposed model and evaluated by conducting an extensive field study. The field study highlighted the fact that most users did not choose the most suitable mode for the context during their initial subscription to the service. The field study also showed that more research needs to be done on an appropriate filtering mechanism for notifications. Users found that the notifications became intrusive and less useful the longer they used them.

Developer discussions range from in-person hallway chats to comment chains on bug reports. Being able to identify discussions that touch on software design would be helpful in documentation and refactoring software. Design mining is the application of machine learning techniques to correctly label a given discussion artifact, such as a pull request, as pertaining (or not) to design. In this work we demonstrate a simple example of how design mining works. We first replicate an existing state-of-the-art design mining study to show how conclusion stability is poor on different artifact types and different projects. Then we introduce two techniques—augmentation and context specificity—that greatly improve the conclusion stability and cross-project relevance of design mining. Our new approach achieves AUC-ROC of 0.88 on within dataset classification and 0.84 on the cross-dataset classification task. / Graduate

What economic factors prevent democratic breakdowns? Since the beginning of the 20th century, more than a hundred countries in the world have transformed their political regime types into democracies. However, not every transition to democracy continued without interruption. Even though some democracies continued without any breaks, some others relapsed into authoritarian regimes via military coups. The consensus in the literature is that wealthy countries are less likely to experience democratic breakdowns. I argue that wealth alone is not enough to increase the duration of democracies. Using quantitative cross-national survival analysis, I show that temporal and international context change the impact of wealth on democratic survival. In addition, I investigate whether democratic survival is more likely in countries where national income is evenly distributed.

Introduction Simulation-based learning is an example of learning in context in which clinical contexts are recreated in controlled settings to facilitate deliberate practice. While widely regarded as effective, unanswered questions exist about what elements of the clinical context must be recreated in simulated settings to promote authenticity. Moreover, the degree of authenticity (or fidelity) required for optimal learning is not known, with current thinking often deemphasizing the importance of physical realism. We therefore sought to explore contextual influences on performance in a ‘context-rich’ clinical setting: paramedicine. Methods We followed constructivist grounded theory principles and recruited currently practicing paramedics to participate in one-on-one, semi-structured interviews. We asked the participants to describe a recent experience in which they attempted to resuscitate a victim of sudden cardiac arrest and asked them how to recreate their experiences in simulated settings. Results Fourteen paramedics provided a total of seventeen interviews, each describing a distinct cardiac arrest event, yielding over ten hours of audio data for analysis. We iteratively identified three major interrelated themes describing contextual influences: the event – its physical characteristics, circumstances and people present; the conceptual response – the cognitive processes and challenges encountered; and the emotional response – the degree of emotional engagement in the management of the resuscitation. We also identified a major theme related to how to simulate these events. Collectively, our results suggest a complex and dynamic interplay between the physical, conceptual and emotional domains of context. Conclusion In contrast to other conceptualizations of context and fidelity, our results suggest that conceptual and emotional responses occur as a result of physical features in the practice environment, arguing in favour of physical authenticity in simulation. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Educators in the health professions have the important task of preparing their students – future physicians, nurses, paramedics, etc. – to perform effectively in clinical practice. This transition from healthcare student to healthcare professional is challenging, in part because classrooms and clinical contexts are different entities: the environment, the people within it, the way knowledge is generated, recalled and applied are all different. To narrow the gap between classroom and clinical practice, educators often promote learning in context, using various strategies to make the classroom more like the clinic (or any other setting in which health care is delivered). The challenge, however, is that exactly what features of the practice setting (context) should be recreated to promote learning is not known. We undertook this study, viewing the clinical context through a paramedic lens, to better understand what features present in real world conditions might influence learning and performance.

Thesis advisor: Gorica Petrovich / Novel foods and novel environments both impact consumption, but their interaction is poorly understood, especially how this interaction varies across habituation and by sex. Prior studies found that placement in a novel context suppressed consumption of a novel food across habituation in a two-choice paradigm with familiar food, and there were neural correlates in the amygdala of consumption under novelty during the first exposure. The current study extended these findings using a paradigm with only a novel food. We placed adult male and female rats in a novel or familiar environment and measured their consumption of a novel, palatable food across four habituation sessions and a final test session. We collected brain tissue after the test session to measure Fos induction with immunohistochemistry during the final exposure to novelty. Fos induction was measured in the central nucleus of the amygdala and the nuclei of the basolateral complex. We found that placement in a novel context suppressed consumption of a novel food at every time point. During the test, Fos induction was elevated in groups tested in the novel context in the medial part of the central nucleus and all nuclei of the basolateral complex except the anterior part of the basolateral nucleus despite the test being the fifth exposure to the novel stimuli. Parts of the central nucleus and nuclei of the basolateral complex showed sex-specific elevations in Fos induction in females regardless of the testing context. Correlations of Fos induction across regions showed that novel context tested groups had similarly elevated Fos induction throughout the central nucleus and basolateral complex, unlike their familiar context tested counterparts. Females had more correlations of Fos induction than males regardless of testing context. These results demonstrated that habituation to eating a novel food is prolonged in a novel environment compared to a familiar environment. Notably, Fos induction remained high in the novel context groups after multiple exposures to novelty. These behavioral and neural findings demonstrate that unfamiliar environments remain salient throughout the process of habituation. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology and Neuroscience.

No description available.