The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of context-dependency of seductive details on recall and transfer in multimedia learning environments. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, the purpose was to identify context-dependent vs. context-independent seductive details in a lightning animation. Seductive details were considered as interesting yet irrelevant sentences in the narration of lightning animation. Sixty-seven undergraduate students participated in Experiment 1 and assigned interestingness scores to the 28 content irrelevant sentences. Participants were assigned to two different groups, context-dependent seductive details group (CDSD) and context-independent seductive details group (CISD). Participants in the CDSD group assigned interestingness scores after watching a lightning animation to be familiarized with the context of lightning formation. Participants in the CISD group watched a historical inquiry animation as a distraction task before assigning interestingness scores. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that 13 of 28 sentences in the lightning formation text were seductive details according to participants of the study. Ultimately, 6 of the 13 seductive details were determined to be context-dependent and 7 were determined to be seductive details were context-independent. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to investigate the effects of context-dependency of seductive details on recall and transfer in multimedia learning environments. Undergraduate students (n = 184) were randomly assigned into four groups. Participants in all groups watched a lightning animation, and performed a recall and a transfer task. The first group watched an animation that did not include any seductive details. The second group watched the animation with context-dependent seductive details only. The third group watched the animation with context-independent seductive details only. The last group watched the animation with both types of seductive details. A 2x2 ANOVA for both recall and transfer, and contrast analyses were conducted to determine the effects of context-dependency of seductive details on recall and transfer. The results indicated that there was no significant effect of context-dependency of seductive details on recall or transfer. The findings are discussed in the context of the related literature and directions for future research are suggested. / Ph. D.

Context information brings new opportunities for efficient and effective applications and services on mobile devices. Many existing work exploit the context dependency of mobile usage for specific applications, and show significant, quantified, performance gains by utilizing context. In order to be practical, such works often pay careful attention to the energy and processing costs of context awareness while attempting to maintain reasonable accuracy. These works also have to deal with the challenges of multiple sources of context, which can lead to a sparse training data set. Even with the abundance of such work, quantifying context-dependency and the relationship between context-dependency and performance achievements remains an open problem, and solutions to manage the and challenges of context awareness remain ad-hoc. To this end, this dissertation methodologically quantifies and measures the context dependency of three principal types of mobile usage in a methodological, application agnostic yet practical manner. The three usages are the websites the user visits, the phone numbers they call, and the apps they use, either built-in or obtained by the user from the App Store . While this dissertation measures the context dependency of these three principal types of mobile usage, its methodology can be readily extended to other context-dependent mobile usage and system resources. This dissertation further presents SmartContext, a framework to systematically optimize the energy cost of context awareness by selecting among different context sources, while satisfying the system designer’s cost-accuracy tradeoffs. Finally, this thesis investigates the collective effect of social context on mobile usage, by separating and comparing LiveLab users based on their socioeconomic groups. The analysis and findings are based on usage and context traces collected in real-life settings from 24 iPhone users over a period of one year. This dissertation presents findings regarding the context dependency of three principal types of mobile usage; visited websites, phone calls, and app usage. The methodology and lessons presented here can be readily extended to other forms of context and context-dependent usage and resources. They guide the development of context aware systems, and highlight the challenges and expectations regarding the context dependency of mobile usage.

Face-to-face interaction has been studied both within sociology and linguistics, as well as withinother disciplines. Often has the perspective been too narrow, something which is not compatiblewith the diverse and dynamic nature of this type of interaction. This narrow view prevents fullunderstanding of interaction. Within this theoretical paper it is suggested that face-to-faceinteraction has to be studied with a broad perspective; when studying face-to-face interaction itis necessary to acknowledge its dynamic nature and therefore it is necessary to combineknowledge from different disciplines. Within this paper, I combine theories from linguistics andsociology in order to gain a broader perspective upon interaction. What has been missing fromearlier research upon face-to-face interaction and upon the competence needed to participatein such interaction is not the knowledge of the different features of interaction but a will toconnect them all. Existing concepts for describing the competence needed in order to be ableto interact have often failed to describe the dynamic, multi-faceted nature of interaction; therehas been a tendency to try to explain everything with just one factor. Within this paper, amore covering concept of the competence needed of an interactant within face-to-faceinteraction is proposed and sketched; a concept which I name Interaction Competence. Thiscompetence is the knowledge and abilities needed of an interactant in order to be able tointeract with others. This concept, which can be a valuable analytical tool for analyzing faceto-face interaction, has Dell Hymes’ concept of Communicative Competence and ErvingGoffman’s and Ann Warfield Rawls’ concept of Interaction Order as building-blocks andconsists of four main areas of competence: Control Body, Command Language, HandleSocio-cultural Knowledge and Understand Interaction Order. Within this paper also the affectof two interactant-external factors: the context and acceptability. Both are found to be highlyrelevant for the Interaction Competence of an interactant, thus the need for acknowledging therole of sufficient and acceptable Interaction Competence is seen. / <p>Presenterades (utöver uppsatsseminariet) inom ramen för Sociologiska Institutionens IMER (Internationella Migration Etniska Relationer)-seminarium</p>

The three components model of empathy proposed by Decety and Jackson (2004) is currently the dominant model of empathy. The three components include: 1) the affective component (Simulation Theory), 2) emotional perspective taking, and 3) emotion regulation (self/other distinction). The purpose of the current study was to examine whether empathic perspective taking is dependent on context and to provide a behavioral basis for a follow-up fMRI study. More specifically, we wanted to know how body contexts (e.g. mood) and situational contexts (e.g. perceived fairness of a partner) affect emotional perspective taking. To examine the interaction between mood and perceived fairness of a partner, a 2 (mood group: neutral vs. negative) × 2 (fairness condition: unfair partner vs. fair partner) between-groups experimental design was employed. Mood induction videos were employed for the mood manipulation and participants played either a fair or unfair preprogrammed partner in a modified ultimatum game. After both manipulations, three measures were used to assess perspective taking and several post-game behavioral measures were also employed. Results were obtained from 73 participants (age: 18-22; female = 46, ~18 in each condition). The results demonstrated that participants in the negative mood had more difficulty empathizing with unfair partners and had a greater desire for revenge against them than participants in a neutral mood in the same unfair situations. Therefore, human empathy is not constant, but varies depending on a variety of contexts. We can now use this paradigm for a future fMRI study to investigate the neural substrates underlying this context dependency with a particular emphasis on the frontopolar cortex and the nucleus accumbens.

This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the so-called `house money' or windfall endowment effect and its main determinants. Chapter 1 provides a detailed survey on the literature related to the house money effect. This effect according to Thaler and Johnson (1990) - refers to the situation where prior gains mitigate the influence of loss aversion and facilitate risk-seeking. The concept borrows its name from the expression employed in the gambling parlance of "playing with the house money", which is used when people gamble while ahead. As the literature has used a variety of concepts and ideas to describe the house money effect, this chapter presents and discusses them within the environment and the related literature that they have emerged. This is done in order to highlight the predominant answers to the main research questions raised in the various strands of the literature, namely: (i) whether people treat money differently depending on its origin; and (ii) the implications of the house money effect for the experimental methodology in economics. The literature is organised and presented according to the context in which the above two research questions have been examined. By presenting results in each particular context, we pin down the contextual differences that might be responsible for the presence (or absence) of the house money effect, and lay the initial ground work to answer a third research question: What drives the house money effect? In this regard, after we demonstrate the context-dependency of the house money effect we present the two main interpretations that it has received, namely that the house money effect is a result of different mental accounting over windfall gains (`windfall effect') or a result of fairness or deservingness concerns ('Lockean desert effect'). Chapter 2 re-examines the house money effect and explores its main driving forces. For that, we employ a novel experimental design utilising a within-subject approach, coupled with the use of three different contexts of economic decisions (a trust game, a set of lotteries and a public good game). Both the within-subject experimental design and the three contexts of economic decisions allow us to better test the two main interpretations of the house money effect. Our experimental data confirm the presence of the house money effect both in the decision to trust (but not in the decision of trustworthiness) in the trust game and in the decision to contribute in the public account of the public good game. However, our findings do not support the hypothesis that changes in risk behaviour of participants are due to different sources of money, suggesting that risk attitudes are robust and independent of the origin of money along the experiment. Therefore, our findings seem to favour interpretations of the house money effect as a result of 'just desert' or fairness preferences rather than the result of different mental accounting over windfall gains. Chapter 3 combines two branches of experimental literature, namely the house money effect and the literature on individual differences in social preferences. Both the house money effect and individual differences have been used extensively to explain cooperation in social dilemmas (and its decline over time). Here, we test the implications of house money on reciprocal behaviour, that is, whether participants in economic experiments are less likely to reciprocate when earned money rather than windfall money is at stake. Using the innovative experimental design of Fischbacher et al. (2001) with strategy method, we classify participants according to their behaviour in a linear public good game, and by adding the within-subject element in our experimental design we test the robustness of this classification across the different origin of endowments. Our results indicate that the types' classification is robust across the origin of money. Contrary to Harrison (2007), we find that participants' decision to free ride or not (contribute or not) is independent of the origin of money, but given that the decision to contribute has been made, contribution levels may vary -actually be lower- when money is earned rather than windfall endowed. We also elicit beliefs about others' contributions and test how these beliefs affected by the "house money" and in turn how they affect the decision to contribute. This discussion relates to what the literature has characterised so far as "anticipatory reciprocity".

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Uma sentença em linguagem natural em formato textual é uma representação sucinta de um conjunto maior de informações contida numa mensagem que um ser humano deseja transmitir a outro. O entendimento de uma sentença pressupõe a obtenção dessas informações a partir da cadeia de caracteres que forma a sentença. Um dos objetivos do processamento computacional de linguagem natural é organizar e armazenar informações para utilizá-las na recuperação das informações subjacentes codificadas em texto. Esta tese apresenta um método para realizar este processo de decodificação de uma sentença, levantando um grafo que simultaneamente descreve a sua estrutura sintática dada por uma gramática e as relações de dependência entre seus elementos constituintes. A decodificação é realizada por um parser gerado automaticamente a partir da especificação de suas regras, permitindo a sua alteração de forma incremental. São apresentados técnicas de projeto e aspectos de implementação. / A sentence in natural language in text format is a reduced representation of a larger set of information contained in a message that a human wishes to transmit to another. The understanding of a sentence assumes that this information is obtained from the characters that form the sentence. One of the goals of natural language computational processing is to organize and store information for use in retrieving the underlying information encoded in text. This thesis presents a method to decode a sentence, obtaining a graph that simultaneously describes its grammatical phrase structure and the dependency relations between its constituents. The parser is automatically generated from the specification of its rules, allowing it to be incrementally modified. Project techniques and implementation aspects are presented.

To provide users with personalized adaptive services only using the accessible computing resources in a cloud environment, context aware applications need to assimilate both the accessed and derived context, i.e. a combination of more than one sensed data and information in the environment. Context data dependency, dependency that arises between the context data producer and consumer, may get introduced in a system due to numerous reasons. But as the number of context dependencies for a service increases, the more complex the system becomes to manage. The thesis addresses issues of how to identify context dependencies, represent such context dependencies and then reduce them in a system. In the first part of the thesis, we present two efficient approaches to determine context dependency relations among various services in ubiquitous computing environment to help better analyse the pervasive services. One approach is based on graph theory, and we have used the topological sort to determine the context dependencies. The second approach is based on solving constraint networks which determines whether an entity is affected when the state of a certain other entity has its state changed, i.e. determining the dynamic nature of context dependency. In the second part of the thesis, we present a mode for representation of context dependencies within a system. Our model that represents context dependencies is based on set theory and first-order predicate logic. The context dependency representation model also represents alternative sources for context acquisition that can be utilized in a case in which the preferred context producers are not available to service the desired context to the relevant context consumer any more. Further, we try to reduce the context dependencies by presenting the idea of profile context, which is based on the proposal of an open framework for context acquisition, management and distribution. This heuristic approach is based on the idea of utilizing mobile nodes in an ad hoc overlay network with more resources than the context producer itself to store various contextual information under the banner of profile context, and further, provide profile context instead of each context individually based on the queries the nodes receive from the context consumers. Bringing together the context information and context updates from various sources, support for context aware decisions can be implemented efficiently in a mobile environment by addressing the issues of context dependency using profile context

A fundamental goal in ecology and evolutionary biology has been to understand how microevolutionary forces affect the origin and maintenance of mutualisms over ecological and evolutionary time scales. Mutualistic partners vary in the reciprocal benefits they provide, yet the role of partner variation on microevolutionary forces that impact the maintenance of mutualisms is unclear. Using the mutualism between legumes and nitrogen fixing symbionts, my dissertation investigated the ecological and evolutionary consequences of variation in partner quality. In the first experiment, I demonstrate how insect herbivory can change the costs and benefits of associating with exploiters, and that some degree of exploitation from non-beneficial rhizobia can reduce insect herbivory, thus removing the fitness advantage of associating purely with beneficial rhizobia. In the second study, I examine how rhizobia genotype modifies competition between hosts grown in kin and non-kin groups. I show that lower fitness in plant kin groups can simply be a by-product of genetic variance in plant size and non-linear relationships between plant size and fitness. I further show that the symbiotic community can change difference in fitness between kin and non-kin groups independent of these by-product effects. In my last chapter, I provide the first empirical evidence that an important mechanism for mutualism stability-- the ability for hosts to preferentially associate with beneficial rhizobia-- is genetically variable and can evolve in response to exploitation. I also show that host preference for beneficial rhizobia can be maintained in legume populations, even in the absence of exploitation. My dissertation provides insight into the potential evolutionary dynamics of stabilizing mechanisms by suggesting that the agents of selection that affect the level of host exploitation can come from biotic factors other than the exploiters themselves. My dissertation has also shown that inclusion of other ecological interactions, such as herbivory, can provide valuable perspective on fitness effects of symbionts on their hosts, and can even change our fundamental assumptions about the effects of exploitation on host fitness, which has formed the backbone of mutualism theory.

A fundamental goal in ecology and evolutionary biology has been to understand how microevolutionary forces affect the origin and maintenance of mutualisms over ecological and evolutionary time scales. Mutualistic partners vary in the reciprocal benefits they provide, yet the role of partner variation on microevolutionary forces that impact the maintenance of mutualisms is unclear. Using the mutualism between legumes and nitrogen fixing symbionts, my dissertation investigated the ecological and evolutionary consequences of variation in partner quality. In the first experiment, I demonstrate how insect herbivory can change the costs and benefits of associating with exploiters, and that some degree of exploitation from non-beneficial rhizobia can reduce insect herbivory, thus removing the fitness advantage of associating purely with beneficial rhizobia. In the second study, I examine how rhizobia genotype modifies competition between hosts grown in kin and non-kin groups. I show that lower fitness in plant kin groups can simply be a by-product of genetic variance in plant size and non-linear relationships between plant size and fitness. I further show that the symbiotic community can change difference in fitness between kin and non-kin groups independent of these by-product effects. In my last chapter, I provide the first empirical evidence that an important mechanism for mutualism stability-- the ability for hosts to preferentially associate with beneficial rhizobia-- is genetically variable and can evolve in response to exploitation. I also show that host preference for beneficial rhizobia can be maintained in legume populations, even in the absence of exploitation. My dissertation provides insight into the potential evolutionary dynamics of stabilizing mechanisms by suggesting that the agents of selection that affect the level of host exploitation can come from biotic factors other than the exploiters themselves. My dissertation has also shown that inclusion of other ecological interactions, such as herbivory, can provide valuable perspective on fitness effects of symbionts on their hosts, and can even change our fundamental assumptions about the effects of exploitation on host fitness, which has formed the backbone of mutualism theory.