Institute of Psychology

This exploratory research investigates how students and professionals use social network sites (SNSs) in the setting of developing and emerging countries. Data collection included focus groups consisting of medical students and faculty as well as the analysis of a Facebook site centred on medical and clinical topics. The findings show how users, both students and professionals, appropriate SNSs from their mobile phones as rich educational tools in informal learning contexts. First, unlike in previous studies, the analysis revealed explicit forms of educational content embedded in informal learning contexts in Facebook. Quizzes, case presentations and associated deliberate (e-)learning practices which are typically found in (more) formal educational settings were identified. Second, from a sociocultural learning perspective, it is shown how the participation in such virtual professional communities across national boundaries permits the announcement and negotiation of occupational status and professional identities.

Background

With the proliferation of portable digital technology, mobile learning is becoming increasingly popular in nursing education and practice. Most of the research in this field has been concentrated on small-scale projects in high income countries. Very little is known about the ways in which nurses and midwives use mobile technology in remote and resource poor areas in informal learning contexts in low and middle income countries.

Objectives

To address this gap, this study investigates whether nurses use mobile phones as effective educational tools in marginalized and remote areas, and if so, how and why.

Setting and Methods

In rural South Africa, 16 nurses who attended an advanced midwifery education program, facilitators and clinical managers were interviewed about their use of digital mobile technology for learning. Techniques of qualitative content analysis were used to examine the data.

Results

Several rich “organically-grown”, learning practices were identified: mobile phone usage facilitated (1) authentic problem solving; (2) reflective practice; (3) emotional support and belongingness; (4) the realization of unpredictable teaching situations; and (5) life-long learning.

Conclusions

It is concluded that mobile phones, and the convergence of mobile phones and social media, in particular, change learning environments. In addition, these tools are suitable to connect learners and learning distributed in marginalized areas. Finally, a few suggestions are made about how these insights from informal settings can inform the development of more systematic mobile learning formats.

Background: Empirical studies show the value of mobile phones as effective educational tools to support learning in the nursing profession, predominantly in high income countries.
Problem statement: The rapidly increasing prevalence of mobile phone technology in Africa nourishes hopes that these tools could be equally effective in lowly resourced contexts, specifically in efforts to achieve the health-related Millennium Development goals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the perception and use of mobile phones as educational and professional tools by nurses in lowly resourced settings.
Methodology: A quantitative survey using self-administered questionnaires was conducted of rural advanced midwives.
Results: Fifty-six nurses (49.6%) from the 113 rural-based midwives attending an advanced midwifery training programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, filled in a questionnaire. The results showed that, whilst nurses regarded their technology competences as low and although they received very little official support from their educational and professional institutions, the majority frequently used mobile functions and applications to support their work and learning processes. They perceived mobile devices with their voice, text, and email functions as important tools for the educational and professional activities of searching for information and engaging with facilitators and peers from work and study contexts. To a lesser extent, the use of social networks, such as WhatsApp and Facebook, were also reported.
Conclusion and recommendation: It is concluded that educational institutions should support the appropriate use of mobile phones more systematically; particularly in relation to the development of mobile network literacy skills.

In this paper, we examine the effects of three video game variables: camera perspective (1st person versus 3rd person point-of-view), session duration, and repeated play on training participants to mitigate three cognitive biases. We developed a 75 minute, 3D immersive video game for use as an experimentation test bed. One-hundred and sixty three participants either watched an instructional decision video or played one of the four versions of the video game. Each participant’s learning was assessed by comparing his or her post-test scores and pre-test scores for knowledge of the biases and demonstrated ability to mitigate them. Results indicated that repeated game play across two sessions produced the largest improvement in learning, and was more effective than the instructional decision video and single session game for mitigating biases. Surprisingly, session duration did not improve learning, and results were mixed for the third person perspective. Overall, the video game did improve participants’ abilities to learn to mitigate three cognitive biases. Implications for training using video games are discussed.

This section reviews a specialty within the field of decision making known as dynamic decision making. Dynamic decisions are characterized by a decision maker choosing among various actions at different points in time in order to control and optimize performance of a dynamic stochastic system. Realistic examples include fighting fires, navigational control, battlefield decisions, medical emergencies, and so on. The section has four parts. The first reviews basic theory concerning optimal decision principles in a dynamic context, the second summarizes empirical approaches to the study of human
performance on dynamic decision tasks, the third presents theoretical models that describe how humans learn to control dynamic systems, and the last discusses methodological issues arising from the study of complex decisions including differences between field versus laboratory research.

In cognitive science there is a seeming paradox: On the one hand, studies of human judgment and decision making have repeatedly shown that people systematically violate optimal behavior when integrating information from multiple sources. On the other hand, optimal models, often Bayesian, have been successful at accounting for information integration in fields such as categorization, memory, and perception. This apparent conflict could be due, in part, to different materials and designs that lead to differences in the nature of processing. Stimuli that require controlled integration of information, such as the quantitative or linguistic information (commonly found in judgment studies), may lead to suboptimal performance. In contrast, perceptual stimuli may lend themselves to automatic processing, resulting in integration that is closer to optimal. We tested this hypothesis with an experiment in which participants categorized faces based on resemblance to a family patriarch. The amount of evidence contained in the top and bottom halves of each test face was independently manipulated. These data allow us to investigate a canonical example of sub-optimal information integration from the judgment and decision making literature, the dilution effect. Splitting the top and bottom halves of a face, a manipulation meant to encourage controlled integration of information, produced farther from optimal behavior and larger dilution effects. The Multi-component Information Accumulation model, a hybrid optimal/averaging model of information integration, successfully accounts for key accuracy, response time, and dilution effects.

Classical economic theory contends that the utility of a choice option should be independent of other options. This view is challenged by the attraction effect, in which the relative preference between two options is altered by the addition of a third, asymmetrically dominated option. Here, we leveraged the attraction effect in the context of intertemporal choices to test whether both decisions and reward prediction errors (RPE) in the absence of choice violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives principle. We first demonstrate that intertemporal decision making is prone to the attraction effect in humans. In an independent group of participants, we then investigated how this affects the neural and behavioral valuation of outcomes using a novel intertemporal lottery task and fMRI. Participants' behavioral responses (i.e., satisfaction ratings) were modulated systematically by the attraction effect and this modulation was correlated across participants with the respective change of the RPE signal in the nucleus accumbens. Furthermore, we show that, because exponential and hyperbolic discounting models are unable to account for the attraction effect, recently proposed sequential sampling models might be more appropriate to describe intertemporal choices. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that the attraction effect modulates subjective valuation even in the absence of choice. The findings also challenge the prospect of using neuroscientific methods to measure utility in a context-free manner and have important implications for theories of reinforcement learning and delay discounting.