Data from three experiments provide the first evidence that children, at least as young as age two, are vigilant of others’ nonverbal cues to credibility, and flexibly use these cues to facilitate learning. Experiment 1 revealed that 2and 3-year-olds prefer to learn about objects from someone who appears, through non-verbal cues, to be confident in performing actions on those objects than from ...

CSCL includes a wide range of scenarios that integrate individual and collaborative learning. Scripts have repeatedly proven useful for guiding learners to engage in specific roles and activities in CSCL environments. The effective mechanisms of scripts in stimulating cognitive and collaborative processes, however, are not yet well understood. Moreover, scripts have been shown to be somewhat in...

This paper describes cognitive ethnography as a method of choice for game studies, multimedia learning, professional development, leisure studies, and activities where context is important. Cognitive ethnography is efficacious for these activities, as it assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings (Hutchins, 1995, 2010) with emphasis on analysis of activities as they happen ...

The United States has become increasingly characterized by stark class divides in family structure. Poor women are less likely to marry than their more affluent counterparts, but far more likely to have a birth outside of marriage. Recent theoretical and qualitative work at the intersection of demography and cultural sociology suggests that these patterns are generated because poor women have h...

This paper investigates whether and how regional social contexts influence fertility decisions of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. It is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as local patterns of social interaction and culture may translate into parameters that directly affect individual behaviour. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) are li...

This paper presents an approach to modeling social transgressions in agent based systems. The approach is intended to be abstract enough that it may be used with many different theories of transgression, apology, forgiveness, etc. We discuss an implementation of this approach in PMFserv, an agent based socio-cognitive modeling framework.

Subjective Well-Being and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link This paper explores the relationship between two well-established concepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer/poor...

This paper examines the tension between the need to maintain diversity and the need to support path creation in the promotion of emerging sustainable technologies. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature and in particular the dynamics of socio-cognitive technology evolution as elaborated by Geels and Raven (2006). This literature offers a framework for analyzing the relat...

Using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper investigates the determinants of training participation in Germany, distinguishing between self-initiated and employerinitiated training. Self-initiated training is considered as being a decision within households rather than purely individual. Therefore, in addition to standard training determinants, information on one’s own and partner’s time ...

This paper aims at presenting the preliminary results of a research work that seeks to understand the users’ response to semantic based technologies, in the context of enterprise sponsored virtual communities. The research follows a qualitative methodology based on an action research approach. It particularly focuses on the socio-cognitive processes that underlie users’ learning and acquisition...