The present study examined the relationship between novice learners' counterfactual thinking (i.e. generating what if and if only thoughts) about their initial training experience with a computer application and subsequent improvement in task performance. The role of anticipated emotions towards goal attainment in task performance was also assessed. Undergraduate students (N = 42) with minimal ...

This study reports the different documentation that teachers encounter in four countries: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. It considers the influence of this documentation on teachers’ implementations of ICT in early years practice. This influence is analysed in light of Seymour Papert’s ‘new forms of learning’ (1996). Early years’ teachers need to decide ‘how best’ computers can ...

Yet, behind the scenes, a very strong assumption—or belief— resides: that there is a fixed single population parameter. In this case, the mean value of weights for teenagers in the city is a single value. Therefore, without a serious flaw in the sampling process, the parameter is constant, though unknown, across all possible samples [2]. However, what if the parameter is not fixed but rather ha...

Let us assume that some businessmen wish to have a meeting. For this to happen, they usually have to meet somewhere. If they cannot meet physically, then they can take part in a video (or audio) conference to discuss whatever needs to be discussed. But what if their meeting is meant to be private? In this case they need a cryptographic protocol that allows them to exchange their ideas remotely,...

Reputation concerns can discipline agents to take costly effort and generate good outcomes. But what if outcomes are not always observed? We consider a model of reputation with shifting observability, and ask how this affects agents’ incentives. We identify a novel and intuitive mechanism by which infrequent observation or inattention can actually strengthen reputation incentives and encourage ...

The study of measurable and integrable selections from a correspondence (set-valued function) has been of interest for some time [e.g., see Aumann (1965), Hildenbrand (1974), etc.]. Here we take up the study of distributions of such selections. The motivation for doing this comes from Mathematical Economics [see Kannai (1970, section 7); the reader interested in the economic applications is ref...

When a non-interactive story is reread, the experience may change, even though the text remains the same. But what if the text is potentially different in each reading session, as is the case in an interactive story – how does rereading change in the context of interactive stories? In our earlier empirical studies of rereading we found that, surprisingly, readers of interactive stories reported...

We analyzed the effects of dopamine signaling on the temporal organization of rest and activity in Drosophila melanogaster. Locomotor behaviors were recorded using a video-monitoring system, and the amounts of movements were quantified by using an image processing program. We, first, confirmed that rest bout durations followed long-tailed (i.e., power-law) distributions, whereas activity bout d...