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Frederiksen Braun heeft een update geplaatst 1 week, 2 dagen geleden
Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as a minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view by showing how direct learning, seen as an instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity. Copyright © 2020 Carvalho and Rolla.Being a housewife may already be a psychosocial risk factor leading to chronic stress and burnout, and this may be aggravated when the housewife must also become the caregiver of a family member with Alzheimer’s. The burnout syndrome and how it can affect general health and the presence of emotional disorders were studied in housewives who were family caregivers of an Alzheimer’s patient. The sample selected was made up of 193 housewives, 96 of whom were also caregivers for a family member with Alzheimer’s. Sociodemographic measures used were the Maslach Burnout Inventory and The General Health Questionnaire. Burnout was found in a significant percentage of participants. Emotional exhaustion, effect on general health, and presence of emotional disorders were higher in caregivers. Emotional exhaustion, general health, and anxiety were more influential, while depersonalization affected the appearance of depressive symptoms more. Being a caregiver and emotional exhaustion appeared to be the best predictors of emotional disorders. It was confirmed that emotional exhaustion influenced appearance of anxiety and depression equally in both groups. In the case of caregivers, an exhaustion-illness spiral was produced. In this group, emotional exhaustion seemed to become more severe as a consequence of the presence of chronic illnesses, and possibly influence the number of hours spent on care and having children living at home. Future research should analyze in greater depth and in a larger sample, the role of these variables and widen the focus of attention to personal variables that could be acting as protective factors and could be subject to intervention. The discussion concludes with some actions that should be included in prevention programs for the groups studied. Copyright © 2020 Avargues-Navarro, Borda-Mas, Campos-Puente, Pérez-San-Gregorio, Martín-Rodríguez and Sánchez-Martín.The relevance of preschool children’s understanding of nature, its elements, how it affects the behavior of human beings, and how human beings influence it, is a two-purpose task. First, it helps to identify the necessary elements for the design of programs that have a significant impact in the development of environmental identity. Second, it also assists in the implementation of environmental education in the school curriculum in Mexico, in order to develop attitudes to preserve the environment from an early age. Based on this logic, the objective of this study was to identify the components of the concept of nature and its relationship with environmental identity, from drawings made by preschool children in a desert environment through a visual discursive analysis. The sample consisted of 118 preschool students whose ages ranged between 5 and 6 years. Participants were selected from four different schools in Hermosillo, Mexico three located in the urban area and one on the coastal area of the State of Sonora. Participants were asked to draw the first thing that came to their minds when they heard the word nature. As a result, all the drawings presented categories such as plants, animals, waterbodies, celestial bodies, abiotic factors, natural locations, locations made by man, and others. Finally, the analysis showed that a general idea of what nature represents to children includes elements of known flora and fauna; however, they did not capture elements of the desert region in which they live. UGT8-IN-1 chemical structure In addition, most participants’ self-definition contained environmental identity. Copyright © 2020 Fraijo-Sing, Beltrán Sierra, Tapia-Fonllem and Valenzuela Peñúñuri.We combined inter- and intraindividual approaches to investigate university students’ biology- and psychology-specific specific epistemic beliefs (beliefs about the nature and structure of knowledge). We expected that university students would perceive the discipline of biology as more absolute and less multiplistic than the discipline of psychology (intraindividual perspective). Furthermore, we expected students from so-called “hard” disciplines to perceive biology as more absolute and less multiplistic than students from soft disciplines (interindividual perspective). Finally, we expected that students from hard disciplines, compared to their peers from soft disciplines, would perceive stronger differences between biology and psychology (combined perspective). Hypotheses were tested, using Bayes factors, in N = 938 university students from a multitude of disciplines. Results revealed that university students perceive biology as considerably more absolute and less multiplistic compared to psychology. However, the findings also suggest that there are no strong interindividual differences between students from hard and soft disciplines regarding the perception of biology. Finally, results revealed that students enrolled in harder disciplines perceive a slightly stronger difference between biology and psychology. In sum, intraindividual effects were considerably stronger, which elicits doubt that students from hard disciplines espouse a fundamentally different set of epistemic beliefs than their peers from soft disciplines. Copyright © 2020 Rosman, Seifried and Merk.