Spontaneous Anthropocentric Language Use in University Students' Explanations of Biological Concepts Varies by Topic and Predicts Misconception Agreement.

Previous research has shown that students employ intuitive thinking when understanding scientific concepts. Three types of intuitive thinking-essentialist, teleological, and anthropic thinking-are used in biology learning and can lead to misconceptions. However, it is unknown how commonly these types of intuitive thinking, or cognitive construals, are used spontaneously in students' explanations across biological concepts and whether this usage is related to endorsement of construal-consistent misconceptions.

Intraoperative Comparison Between Strain Elastography and Preoperative Magnetic Resonance Imaging Features in High-Grade Gliomas Using Fusion Imaging: A Pilot Study.

Objective: To compare the elastographic patterns of high-grade gliomas (HGGs) solid portions and those of adjacent healthy brain parenchyma, on intraoperative ultrasound, with magnetic resonance image (MRI) characteristics.

Methods: Clinical records and images of HGGs patients, operated between June and December 2018, were retrospectively reviewed. Fusion images were used to compare preoperative gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted MRI/fluid-attenuated inversion recovery images (Gd-T1 MRI/FLAIR) to intraoperative strain elastography (SE).

Dipping Your Toe in The CURE Pool: Longitudinal Tracking of Instructors Suggests Use of a Short-Duration CURE Can Catalyze Expansion to Longer CURE Experiences.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are an effective method of engaging large numbers of students in authentic research but are associated with barriers to adoption. Short CURE modules may serve as a low-barrier entryway, but their effectiveness in promoting expansion has not been studied. The Prevalence of Antibiotic Resistance in the Environment (PARE) project is a modular CURE designed to be a low-barrier gateway into CURE use.

The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network.

The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers.

Postoperative Serum Cortisol and Cushing Disease Recurrence in Patients With Corticotroph Adenomas.

Context: In Cushing disease, the association between the rate of serum cortisol decline and recurrent disease after corticotroph adenoma removal has not been adequately characterized.

Objective: To analyze postoperative serum cortisol and recurrence rates in Cushing disease.

Methods: Patients with Cushing disease and pathology-confirmed corticotroph adenoma were retrospectively studied.

Feasibility Pilot Study of an Opioid Helpline for Individuals at High Risk for Opioid Use Disorder.

Background: Evidence suggests that educational interventions delivered by healthcare providers can be effective in altering patients' attitudes toward pain management and in referral to addiction treatment when appropriate. Time constraints during visits limit the delivery of such important interventions.

Objective: This study aims to explore the feasibility and perceived value of an opioid helpline that provides resources to individuals suffering from or at risk for opioid use disorder.

Why we should care about moral foundations when preparing for the next pandemic: Insights from Canada, the UK and the US.

Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking "moral foundations" (i.e.

Conceptualizing Human-Nature Relationships: Implications of Human Exceptionalist Thinking for Sustainability and Conservation.

The ways in which people conceptualize the human-nature relationship have significant implications for proenvironmental values and attitudes, sustainable behavior, and environmental policy measures. Human exceptionalism (HE) is one such conceptual framework, involving the belief that humans and human societies exist independently of the ecosystems in which they are embedded, promoting a sharp ontological boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world. In this paper, we introduce HE in more depth, exploring the impact of HE on perceptions of the human-nature relationship, the role of culture in HE, and speculating on the origins of HE.

Intuitive biological thinking in Chinese 8th graders.

People spontaneously engage in systematic ways of thinking about biology such as human exceptionalism (the tendency of viewing human species as separate from nonhuman species), essentialism (the tendency of assuming category membership as determined by an underlying essence), and teleology (the tendency of seeing purpose as the cause). However, with the majority of past research drawn on Western samples, little is known about whether various types of intuitive biological thinking apply to non-Western contexts. To better understand the nature and cultural prevalence of intuitive biological thinking, we measured essentialist, teleological, and human exceptionalist thinking in a group of Chinese 8th graders.

Effects of Reading Interventions on Student Understanding of and Misconceptions about Antibiotic Resistance.

Students possess informal, intuitive ways of reasoning about the world, including biological phenomena. Although useful in some cases, intuitive reasoning can also lead to the development of scientifically inaccurate ideas that conflict with central concepts taught in formal biology education settings, including evolution. Using antibiotic resistance as an example of evolution, we developed a set of reading interventions and an assessment tool to examine the extent to which differences in instructional language affect undergraduate student misconceptions and intuitive reasoning.

Characterization of a paradoxical post-operative increase in serum cortisol in Cushing disease.

Purpose: In Cushing disease, early post-operative serum cortisol fluctuations have not been adequately characterized, and their association with initial remission and recurrence is unclear.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study of patients with Cushing disease was conducted at two institutions. A "riser" was defined a priori as a paradoxical increase in serum cortisol with an immediate incremental increase in serum cortisol over three consecutive cortisol draws separated by roughly 6-h (definition 1).

Do We See Masculine Faces as Competent and Feminine Faces as Warm? Effects of Sexual Dimorphism on Facial Perception.

Previous research on non-facial features demonstrated that masculinity and femininity correlated highly with perceived competence and warmth, respectively. Several studies focused on dimorphic facial cues and found an association between masculine faces and competence. However, there's no study exploring the association between facial dimorphism and social judgment both using explicit and implicit experimental paradigms, i.

Development of Conceptual Flexibility in Intuitive Biology: Effects of Environment and Experience.

Living things can be classified in many ways, such as taxonomic similarity (lions and lynx), or shared ecological habitat (ducks and turtles). The present studies used card-sorting and triad tasks to explore developmental and experiential changes in -the ability to switch between taxonomic and ecological construals of living things-as well as two processes underlying conceptual flexibility: (i.e.

The development of essentialist, ethnic, and civic intuitions about national categories.

Given current global migration patterns, understanding of children's intuitions about nationality and national categories is an important and emerging focus for developmental psychologists. We review theoretical and empirical work on three different types of intuition: (1) that nationality is primarily determined by ancestry (an ethnic intuition); (2) that nationality is determined by commitment to national institutions (a civic intuition); and (3) that membership in a national category is determined by possession of an invisible essence which explains the similarities between members of that category. We examine assumptions about the relations which hold between all three intuitions and derive a series of questions about how these intuitions develop, how they relate to each other, and how they might be affected by children's experience.

Cognitive Construal-Consistent Instructor Language in the Undergraduate Biology Classroom.

Researchers have identified patterns of intuitive thinking that are commonly used to understand and reason about the biological world. These (anthropic, teleological, and essentialist thinking), while useful in everyday life, have also been associated with misconceptions about biological science. Although construal-based thinking is pervasive among students, we know little about the prevalence of construal-consistent language in the university science classroom.

Cognitive Constraints Shape Public Debate on the Risks of Synthetic Biology.

We consider efforts to understand public perceptions of synthetic biology, describing a novel cognitive science approach indicating that cognitive biases constrain risk perceptions of synthetic biology. We discuss the implications of these findings and outline how they may be harnessed to improve the quality of public debate.

Investigating Undergraduate Students' Use of Intuitive Reasoning and Evolutionary Knowledge in Explanations of Antibiotic Resistance.

Natural selection is a central concept throughout biology; however, it is a process frequently misunderstood. Bacterial resistance to antibiotic medications provides a contextual example of the relevance of evolutionary theory and is also commonly misunderstood. While research has shed light on student misconceptions of natural selection, minimal study has focused on misconceptions of antibiotic resistance.

Anthropocentric by Default? Attribution of Familiar and Novel Properties to Living Things.

Humans naturally and effortlessly use a set of cognitive tools to reason about biological entities and phenomena. Two such tools, essentialist thinking and teleological thinking, appear to be early developmental cognitive defaults, used extensively in childhood and under limited circumstances in adulthood, but prone to reemerge under time pressure or cognitive load. We examine the nature of another such tool: anthropocentric thinking.

Respiratory alkalosis may impair the production of vitamin D and lead to significant morbidity, including the fibromyalgia syndrome.

Hyperventilation caused by physical and/or psychological stress may lead to significant respiratory alkalosis and an elevated systemic pH. The alkalotic pH may in turn suppress the normal renal release of phosphate into the urine, thereby interrupting the endogenous production of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (calcitriol). This could cause a shortfall in its normal production, leading to a variety of adverse consequences.

Development of essentialist thinking about religion categories in Northern Ireland (and the United States).

Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important categories. Previous evidence from Israel suggests that kindergarteners selectively engage in essentialist reasoning about culturally salient (ethnicity) categories, and that this is attenuated among children in integrated schools.

Intuitive biological thought: Developmental changes and effects of biology education in late adolescence.

A large body of cognitive research has shown that people intuitively and effortlessly reason about the biological world in complex and systematic ways. We addressed two questions about the nature of intuitive biological reasoning: How does intuitive biological thinking change during adolescence and early adulthood? How does increasing biology education influence intuitive biological thinking? To do so, we developed a battery of measures to systematically test three components of intuitive biological thought: anthropocentric thinking, teleological thinking and essentialist thinking, and tested 8th graders and university students (both biology majors, and non-biology majors). Results reveal clear evidence of persistent intuitive reasoning among all populations studied, consistent but surprisingly small differences between 8th graders and college students on measures of intuitive biological thought, and consistent but again surprisingly small influence of increasing biology education on intuitive biological reasoning.

Relations between intuitive biological thinking and biological misconceptions in biology majors and nonmajors.

Research and theory development in cognitive psychology and science education research remain largely isolated. Biology education researchers have documented persistent scientifically inaccurate ideas, often termed misconceptions, among biology students across biological domains. In parallel, cognitive and developmental psychologists have described intuitive conceptual systems--teleological, essentialist, and anthropocentric thinking--that humans use to reason about biology.

Dopamine increases CD14+CD16+ monocyte migration and adhesion in the context of substance abuse and HIV neuropathogenesis.

Drug abuse is a major comorbidity of HIV infection and cognitive disorders are often more severe in the drug abusing HIV infected population. CD14+CD16+ monocytes, a mature subpopulation of peripheral blood monocytes, are key mediators of HIV neuropathogenesis. Infected CD14+CD16+ monocyte transmigration across the blood brain barrier mediates HIV entry into the brain and establishes a viral reservoir within the CNS.

Wireless smart meters and public acceptance: the environment, limited choices, and precautionary politics.

Wireless smart meters (WSMs) promise numerous environmental benefits, but they have been installed without full consideration of public acceptance issues. Although societal-implications research and regulatory policy have focused on privacy, security, and accuracy issues, our research indicates that health concerns have played an important role in the public policy debates that have emerged in California. Regulatory bodies do not recognize non-thermal health effects for non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, but both homeowners and counter-experts have contested the official assurances that WSMs pose no health risks.

Development of the biology card sorting task to measure conceptual expertise in biology.

There are widespread aspirations to focus undergraduate biology education on teaching students to think conceptually like biologists; however, there is a dearth of assessment tools designed to measure progress from novice to expert biological conceptual thinking. We present the development of a novel assessment tool, the Biology Card Sorting Task, designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual knowledge of biology. While modeled on tasks from cognitive psychology, this task is unique in its design to test two hypothesized conceptual frameworks for the organization of biological knowledge: 1) a surface feature organization focused on organism type and 2) a deep feature organization focused on fundamental biological concepts.