Multi-Level Linguistic Alignment in a Dynamic Collaborative Problem-Solving Task.

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low-level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high-level convergence. Linguistic alignment captures the ways people reuse, that is, "align to," the lexical, syntactic, and semantic forms of others' utterances. Our focus is on the temporal change of multi-level linguistic alignment, as well as how alignment is related to communicative outcomes within a unique collaborative problem-solving paradigm. The primary task, situated within a virtual educational video game, requires creative thinking between three people where the paths for possible solutions are highly variable. We find that over time interactions are marked by decreasing lexical and syntactic alignment, with a trade-off of increasing semantic alignment. However, greater semantic alignment does not translate into better team performance. Overall, these findings provide greater clarity on the role of linguistic coordination within complex and dynamic collaborative problem-solving tasks.

Sadness facilitates "deeper" reading comprehension: a behavioural and eye tracking study.

Reading is one of the most common everyday activities, yet research elucidating how affective influence reading processes and outcomes is sparse with inconsistent results. To investigate this question, we randomly assigned participants (N = 136) to happiness (positive affect), sadness (negative affect), and neutral video-induction conditions prior to engaging in self-paced reading of a long, complex science text. Participants completed assessments targeting multiple levels of comprehension (e.g. recognising factual information, integrating different textual components, and open-ended responses of concepts from memory) after reading and after a week-long delay. Results indicated that the Sadness (vs. Happiness) condition had higher comprehension scores, with the largest effects emerging for assessments targeting deeper levels comprehension immediately after reading. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that such benefits may be partly driven by sustained attentional focus over the 20-minute reading session. We discuss results with respect to theories on affect, cognition, and text comprehension.

Using artificial intelligence to assess personal qualities in college admissions.

Personal qualities like prosocial purpose and leadership predict important life outcomes, including college success. Unfortunately, the holistic assessment of personal qualities in college admissions is opaque and resource intensive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) advance the goals of holistic admissions? While cost-effective, AI has been criticized as a "black box" that may inadvertently penalize already disadvantaged subgroups when used in high-stakes settings. Here, we consider an AI approach to assessing personal qualities that aims to overcome these limitations. Research assistants and admissions officers first identified the presence/absence of seven personal qualities in n = 3131 applicant essays describing extracurricular and work experiences. Next, we fine-tuned pretrained language models with these ratings, which successfully reproduced human codes across demographic subgroups. Last, in a national sample (N = 309,594), computer-generated scores collectively demonstrated incremental validity for predicting 6-year college graduation. We discuss challenges and opportunities of AI for assessing personal qualities.

Emotional regularity: associations with personality, psychological health, and occupational outcomes.

Emotional regularity is the degree to which a person maintains and returns to a set of emotional states over time. The present investigation examined associations between emotional regularity and extant emotion measures as well as psychologically relevant dimensions of personality, health, and real-world occupational outcomes. Participants included 598 U.S. adults who provided daily experience sampling reports on their emotional states for approximately two months. Results suggest that emotional regularity was related to, but distinct from, well-established measures of emotion including emotional intensity, variability, covariation, inertia, granularity, and emodiversity. Furthermore, emotional regularity significantly predicted measures of personality, psychological health, and occupational outcomes even when accounting for extant emotion measures and sociodemographic covariates. Finally, it explained modest (7.5%) improvement (in terms of cross-validated RSq.) over baseline models containing emotional intensity, variability, and sociodemographic covariates. These findings suggest that emotional regularity may provide an important indicator of healthy emotional functioning and may be a promising area for further scientific discovery.

The association between the COVID-19 pandemic and postpartum care provision.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic led to a rapid transformation in the healthcare system to mitigate viral exposure. In the perinatal context, one change included altering the prenatal visit cadence and increasing the utilization of telehealth methods. Whether this approach had inadvertent negative implications for postpartum care, including postpartum depression screening and contraceptive utilization, is unknown. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine whether preventative health service utilization, including postpartum depression screening and contraceptive utilization, differed during the COVID-19 pandemic when compared with the prepandemic period. STUDY DESIGN: This retrospective cohort study included all pregnant patients who received prenatal care at 1 of 5 academic obstetrical practices and who delivered at Northwestern Memorial Hospital either before (delivery from September 1, 2018, to January 1, 2019) or during (delivery from February 1, 2020, to May 15, 2020) the COVID-19 pandemic. Completion of postpartum depression screening was assessed by reviewing standardized fields in the documentation associated with the screening in the electronic health record system. The method of contraception used was ascertained from the postpartum clinical documentation. Patients were classified as initiating long-acting reversible contraception use if they received NEXPLANON (etonogestrel implant) or an intrauterine device during the hospitalization for delivery or within 3 months following delivery. Bivariable and multivariable analyses were performed. RESULTS: Of the 2375 pregnant patients included in this study, 1120 (47%) delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pregnant patients who delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly less likely to have undergone postpartum depression screening (45.5% vs 86.2%; P<.01); this association persisted after adjusting for potential confounders (adjusted odds ratio, 0.13; 95% confidence interval, 0.11-0.16). Pregnant patients who delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic also were significantly less likely to initiate long-acting reversible contraception use within 3 months of delivery (13.5% vs 19.6%; adjusted odds ratio, 0.67; 95% confidence interval, 0.53-0.84). CONCLUSION: The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a decrease in the completion of postpartum depression screenings and fewer patients initiating long-acting reversible contraception use overall. These results can inform adaptations in healthcare delivery in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

What Eye Movements Reveal About Later Comprehension of Long Connected Texts.

We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities: (a) the weak association hypothesis: Links between eye movements and comprehension are weak and short-lived, versus (b) the strong association hypothesis: The two are robustly linked, even after a delay. Using a predictive modeling approach, we trained regression models to predict comprehension scores from global eye movement features, using participant-level cross-validation to ensure that the models generalize across participants. We used data from three studies in which readers (Ns = 104, 130, 147) answered multiple-choice comprehension questions ~30 min after reading a 6,500-word text, or after reading up to eight 1,000-word texts. The models generated accurate predictions of participants' text comprehension scores (correlations between observed and predicted comprehension: 0.384, 0.362, 0.372, ps < .001), in line with the strong association hypothesis. We found that making more, but shorter fixations, consistently predicted comprehension across all studies. Furthermore, models trained on one study's data could successfully predict comprehension on the others, suggesting generalizability across studies. Collectively, these findings suggest that there is a robust link between eye movements and subsequent comprehension of a long connected text, thereby connecting theories of low-level eye movements with those of higher order text processing during reading.

The eye-mind wandering link: Identifying gaze indices of mind wandering across tasks.

During mind wandering, visual processing of external information is attenuated. Accordingly, mind wandering is associated with changes in gaze behaviors, albeit findings are inconsistent in the literature. This heterogeneity obfuscates a complete view of the moment-to-moment processing priorities of the visual system during mind wandering. We hypothesize that this observed heterogeneity is an effect of idiosyncrasy across tasks with varying spatial allocation demands, visual processing demands, and discourse processing demands and reflects a strategic, compensatory shift in how the visual system operates during mind wandering. We recorded eye movements and mind wandering (via thought-probes) as 132 college-aged adults completed a battery of 7 short (6 min) tasks with different visual demands. We found that for tasks requiring extensive sampling of the visual field, there were fewer fixations, and, depending on the specific task, fixations were longer and/or more dispersed. This suggests that visual sampling is sparser and potentially slower and more dispersed to compensate for the decreased sampling rate during mind wandering. For tasks that demand centrally focused gaze, mind wandering was accompanied by more exploratory eye movements, such as shorter and more dispersed fixations as well as larger saccades. Gaze behaviors were not reliably associated with mind wandering during a film comprehension task. These findings provide insight into how the visual system prioritizes external information when attention is focused inward and indicates the importance of task demands when assessing the relationship between eye movements, visual processing, and mind wandering. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Validation of survey effort measures of grit and self-control in a sample of high school students.

Personality traits such as grit and self-control are important determinants of success in life outcomes. However, most measures of these traits, which rely on self-reports, might be biased when used for the purpose of evaluating education policies or interventions. Recent research has shown the potential of survey effort-in particular, item non-response and careless answering-as a proxy measure of these traits. The current investigation uses a dataset of high school seniors (N = 513) to investigate survey effort measures in relationship with teacher reports, performance task measures, high school academic outcomes, and college attendance. Our results show promise for use of survey effort as proxy measures of grit and self-control.

How Does High School Extracurricular Participation Predict Bachelor's Degree Attainment? It is Complicated.

This study answered novel questions about the connection between high school extracurricular dosage (number of activities and participation duration) and the attainment of a bachelor's degree. Using data from the Common Application and the National Student Clearinghouse (N = 311,308), we found that greater extracurricular participation positively predicted bachelor's degree attainment. However, among students who ultimately earned a bachelor's degree, participating in more than a moderate number of high school activities (3 or 4) predicted decreasing odds of earning a bachelor's degree on time (within 4 years). This effect intensified as participation duration increased, such that students who participated in the greatest number of high school activities for the most years were the most likely to delay college graduation.

Beyond Dyadic Coordination: Multimodal Behavioral Irregularity in Triads Predicts Facets of Collaborative Problem Solving.

We hypothesize that effective collaboration is facilitated when individuals and environmental components form a synergy where they work together and regulate one another to produce stable patterns of behavior, or regularity, as well as adaptively reorganize to form new behaviors, or irregularity. We tested this hypothesis in a study with 32 triads who collaboratively solved a challenging visual computer programming task for 20 min following an introductory warm-up phase. Multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis was used to examine fine-grained (i.e., every 10 s) collective patterns of regularity across team members' speech rate, body movement, and team interaction with the shared user interface. We found that teams exhibited significant patterns of regularity as compared to shuffled baselines, but there were no systematic trends in regularity across time. We also found that periods of regularity were associated with a reduction in overall behavior. Notably, the production of irregular behavior predicted expert-coded metrics of collaborative activity, such as teams' ability to construct shared knowledge and effectively negotiate and coordinate execution of solutions, net of overall behavioral production and behavioral self-similarity. Our findings support the theory that groups can interact to form interpersonal synergies and indicate that information about system-level dynamics is a viable way to understand and predict effective collaborative processes.

Algal Sources of Sequestered Chloroplasts in the Sacoglossan Sea Slug Elysia crispata Vary by Location and Ecotype.

Sacoglossan sea slugs feed by suctorially consuming siphonaceous green algae. Most sacoglossan species are feeding specialists, but the Caribbean coral reef-dwelling Elysia crispata is polyphagous and sequesters chloroplasts from multiple algal species into cells lining its digestive diverticulum for use in photosynthesis. We have used sequences of the chloroplast-encoded rbcL gene to compare the chloroplast donor algae in five populations of E. crispata from various Caribbean locations. We found that E. crispata utilizes more algal species than was previously known, including some algae previously not reported as present in the region. In addition, slugs from each location had unique chloroplast arrays with little overlap, except that all locations had slugs feeding on algae within the genus Bryopsis. This variation in diet between locations suggests that the slugs may be exhibiting local adaptation in their dietary choices, and it highlights ecological differences between the Caribbean-wide reef-dwelling ecotypes and the mangrove lagoon ecotypes found in the Florida Keys.

A draft genome assembly of the solar-powered sea slug Elysia chlorotica.

Elysia chlorotica, a sacoglossan sea slug found off the East Coast of the United States, is well-known for its ability to sequester chloroplasts from its algal prey and survive by photosynthesis for up to 12 months in the absence of food supply. Here we present a draft genome assembly of E. chlorotica that was generated using a hybrid assembly strategy with Illumina short reads and PacBio long reads. The genome assembly comprised 9,989 scaffolds, with a total length of 557 Mb and a scaffold N50 of 442 kb. BUSCO assessment indicated that 93.3% of the expected metazoan genes were completely present in the genome assembly. Annotation of the E. chlorotica genome assembly identified 176 Mb (32.6%) of repetitive sequences and a total of 24,980 protein-coding genes. We anticipate that the annotated draft genome assembly of the E. chlorotica sea slug will promote the investigation of sacoglossan genetics, evolution, and particularly, the genetic signatures accounting for the long-term functioning of algal chloroplasts in an animal.

A brief behavioral measure of frustration tolerance predicts academic achievement immediately and two years later.

Achieving important goals is widely assumed to require confronting obstacles, failing repeatedly, and persisting in the face of frustration. Yet empirical evidence linking achievement and frustration tolerance is lacking. To facilitate work on this important topic, we developed and validated a novel behavioral measure of frustration tolerance: the Mirror Tracing Frustration Task (MTFT). In this 5-min task, participants allocate time between a difficult tracing task and entertaining games and videos. In two studies of young adults (Study 1: N = 148, Study 2: N = 283), we demonstrated that the MTFT increased frustration more than 18 other emotions, and that MTFT scores were related to self-reported frustration tolerance. Next, we assessed whether frustration tolerance correlated with similar constructs, including self-control and grit, as well as objective measures of real-world achievement. In a prospective longitudinal study of high-school seniors (N = 391), MTFT scores predicted grade-point average and standardized achievement test scores, and-more than 2 years after completing the MTFT-progress toward a college degree. Though small in size (i.e., rs ranging from .10 to .24), frustration tolerance predicted outcomes over and above a rich set of covariates, including IQ, sociodemographics, self-control, and grit. These findings demonstrate the validity of the MTFT and highlight the importance of frustration tolerance for achieving valued goals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

How the stimulus influences mind wandering in semantically rich task contexts.

What do we think about when we mind wander and where do these thoughts come from? We tested the idea that semantically rich stimuli yield patterns of mind wandering that are closely coupled with the stimuli compared to being more internally triggered. We analyzed the content of 949 self-reported zone outs (1218 thoughts) and 519 of their triggers from 88 participants who read an instructional text and watched a film for 20 min each. We found that mind wandering associated with memory retrieval was more frequent than prospection and introspection across both stimuli. Over 70% of autobiographical and semantic memory retrievals were triggered by the content of the stimuli, compared to around 30% for prospective and introspective thoughts. Further, latent semantic analysis revealed that semantic and unspecific memories were more "semantically" similar to their triggers than prospective and introspective thoughts, suggesting that they arise from spontaneous associations with the stimulus. These findings suggest a re-evaluation of how internal concerns and the external world give rise to mind wandering and emphasize the importance of studying mind wandering in semantically rich contexts akin to much of the real world.

Re-Watching Lectures as a Study Strategy and Its Effect on Mind Wandering.

Material re-exposure (e.g., re-reading) is a popular mnemonic strategy, however, its utility has been questioned. We extend research on re-reading to re-watching - an emerging mnemonic technique given the increased use of recorded lectures today (e.g., in online courses). Consistent with findings from recent investigations of re-reading, there were no benefits of massed re-watching on memory for lecture material and re-watching increased rates of mind wandering. We discuss implications for understanding the cognitive consequences of re-exposure-based mnemonics.

Gaze-based signatures of mind wandering during real-world scene processing.

Physiological limitations on the visual system require gaze to move from location to location to extract the most relevant information within a scene. Therefore, gaze provides a real-time index of the information-processing priorities of the visual system. We investigated gaze allocation during mind wandering (MW), a state where cognitive priorities shift from processing task-relevant external stimuli (i.e., the visual world) to task-irrelevant internal thoughts. In both a main study and a replication, we recorded the eye movements of college-aged adults who studied images of urban scenes and responded to pseudorandom thought probes on whether they were mind wandering or attentively viewing at the time of the probe. Probe-caught MW was associated with fewer and longer fixations, greater fixation dispersion, and more frequent eyeblinks (only observed in the main study) relative to periods of attentive scene viewing. These findings demonstrate that gaze indices typically considered to represent greater engagement with scene processing (e.g., longer fixations) can also indicate MW. In this way, the current work exhibits a need for empirical investigations and computational models of gaze control to account for MW for a more accurate representation of the moment-to-moment information-processing priorities of the visual system. (PsycINFO Database Record

Driven to distraction: A lack of change gives rise to mind wandering.

How does the dynamic structure of the external world direct attention? We examined the relationship between event structure and attention to test the hypothesis that narrative shifts (both theoretical and perceived) negatively predict attentional lapses. Self-caught instances of mind wandering were collected while 108 participants watched a 32.5 min film called The Red Balloon. We used theoretical codings of situational change and human perceptions of event boundaries to predict mind wandering in 5-s intervals. Our findings suggest a temporal alignment between the structural dynamics of the film and mind wandering reports. Specifically, the number of situational changes and likelihood of perceiving event boundaries in the prior 0-15 s interval negatively predicted mind wandering net of low-level audiovisual features. Thus, mind wandering is less likely to occur when there is more event change, suggesting that narrative shifts keep attention from drifting inwards.

An automated behavioral measure of mind wandering during computerized reading.

Mind wandering is a ubiquitous phenomenon in which attention shifts from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in mind wandering, but research has been stymied by a lack of objective measures, leading to a near-exclusive reliance on self-reports. We addressed this issue by developing an eye-gaze-based, machine-learned model of mind wandering during computerized reading. Data were collected in a study in which 132 participants reported self-caught mind wandering while reading excerpts from a book on a computer screen. A remote Tobii TX300 or T60 eyetracker recorded their gaze during reading. The data were used to train supervised classification models to discriminate between mind wandering and normal reading in a manner that would generalize to new participants. We found that at the point of maximal agreement between the model-based and self-reported mind-wandering means (smallest difference between the group-level means: M model = .310, M self = .319), the participant-level mind-wandering proportional distributions were similar and were significantly correlated (r = .400). The model-based estimates were internally consistent (r = .751) and predicted text comprehension more strongly than did self-reported mind wandering (r model = -.374, r self = -.208). Our results also indicate that a robust strategy of probabilistically predicting mind wandering in cases with poor or missing gaze data led to improved performance on all metrics, as compared to simply discarding these data. Our findings demonstrate that an automated objective measure might be available for laboratory studies of mind wandering during reading, providing an appealing alternative or complement to self-reports.

Correction: Central Presynaptic Terminals Are Enriched in ATP but the Majority Lack Mitochondria.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125185.].

Cognitive coupling during reading.

We hypothesize that cognitively engaged readers dynamically adjust their reading times with respect to text complexity (i.e., reading times should increase for difficult sections and decrease for easier ones) and failure to do so should impair comprehension. This hypothesis is consistent with theories of text comprehension but has surprisingly been untested. We tested this hypothesis by analyzing 4 datasets in which participants (N = 484) read expository texts using a self-paced reading paradigm. Participants self-reported mind wandering in response to pseudorandom thought-probes during reading and completed comprehension assessments after reading. We computed two measures of cognitive coupling by regressing each participant's paragraph-level reading times on two measures of text complexity: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Word Concreteness scores. The two coupling measures yielded convergent findings: coupling was a negative predictor of mind wandering and a positive predictor of both text- and inference-level comprehension. Goodness-of-fit, measured with Akaike information criterion, also improved after adding coupling to the reading-time only models. Furthermore, cognitive coupling mediated the relationship between mind wandering and comprehension, supporting the hypothesis that mind wandering engenders a decoupling of attention from external stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record