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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Common origins of diverse misconceptions: cognitive principles and the development of biology thinking.

Many ideas in the biological sciences seem especially difficult to understand, learn, and teach successfully. Our goal in this feature is to explore how these difficulties may stem not from the complexity or opacity of the concepts themselves, but from the fact that they may clash with informal, intuitive, and deeply held ways of understanding the world that have been studied for decades by psychologists. We give a brief overview of the field of developmental cognitive psychology.

Where the wild things are: informal experience and ecological reasoning.

Category-based induction requires selective use of different relations to guide inferences; this article examines the development of inferences based on ecological relations among living things. Three hundred and forty-six 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children from rural, suburban, and urban communities projected novel diseases or insides from one species to an ecologically or taxonomically related species; they were also surveyed about hobbies and activities. Frequency of ecological inferences increased with age and with reports of informal exploration of nature, and decreased with population density.

The relevance framework for category-based induction: Evidence from garden-path arguments.

Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) suggests that people expend cognitive effort when processing information in proportion to the cognitive effects to be gained from doing so. This theory has been used to explain how people apply their knowledge appropriately when evaluating category-based inductive arguments (Medin, Coley, Storms, & Hayes, 2003). In such arguments, people are told that a property is true of premise categories and are asked to evaluate the likelihood that it is also true of conclusion categories.

Inductive reasoning about causally transmitted properties.

Different intuitive theories constrain and guide inferences in different contexts. Formalizing simple intuitive theories as probabilistic processes operating over structured representations, we present a new computational model of category-based induction about causally transmitted properties. A first experiment demonstrates undergraduates' context-sensitive use of taxonomic and food web knowledge to guide reasoning about causal transmission and shows good qualitative agreement between model predictions and human inferences.

Effects of time pressure on context-sensitive property induction.

Past research suggests that category-based induction flexibly draws on different kinds of knowledge in different contexts, and that different kinds of knowledge may differ in accessibility. The present study investigates the degree to which knowledge accessibility mediates context-sensitive induction by examining the effects of time pressure on inferences about novel properties of animal species. Participants were told about a novel gene or a novel disease that was true of one category of animals, then rated the likelihood that taxonomically, ecologically, and unrelated animals had the same property, under speeded or delayed conditions.

Folkbiology of freshwater fish.

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors.

Sequential classification of endocrine stages during reproductive aging in women: the FREEDOM study.

Objective: Reproductive aging involves complex endocrine changes affecting women's fertility, health, and well-being; however, understanding of the specific changes involved is limited by the lack of detailed quantitative studies. We undertook a thorough study with the aim of characterizing the different endocrine stages involved in female reproductive aging.

Design: FREEDOM is a cohort study designed to determine the endocrine changes during reproductive aging in women.