The ability to make one's own choices is vital to the experience of intentional behavior. Such agency experiences are reflected in the perceptual compression of time between actions and resulting ...outcomes. Whereas some studies show that choice limitations weaken temporal binding, other studies do not find such an effect. Reviewing the literature, we noted two potential factors that may moderate choice limitation effects on temporal binding: (a) the extent to which individuals represent their actions in terms of the consequences they produce; and (b) the response mode of the time interval estimation measurement where participants report numbers or use a slider to indicate time intervals. Testing these conceptual and methodological factors in two separate experiments yielded clear effects of choice limitation on temporal binding but no clear moderator role of the two factors. Interestingly, overall analyses showed that the choice limitation effect gradually vanishes over time.
•Choice limitation increases the perceived time between an action and its outcome, suggesting weaker temporal binding.•Neither outcome focus nor response mode significantly moderates the choice limitation effect on temporal binding.•The impact of choice limitations on time interval estimations decreases over time.
While gamification is gaining ground in business, marketing, corporate management, and wellness initiatives, its application in education is still an emerging trend. This article presents a study of ...the published empirical research on the application of gamification to education. The study is limited to papers that discuss explicitly the effects of using game elements in specific educational contexts. It employs a systematic mapping design. Accordingly, a categorical structure for classifying the research results is proposed based on the extracted topics discussed in the reviewed papers. The categories include gamification design principles, game mechanics, context of applying gamification (type of application, educational level, and academic subject), implementation, and evaluation. By mapping the published works to the classification criteria and analyzing them, the study highlights the directions of the currently conducted empirical research on applying gamification to education. It also indicates some major obstacles and needs, such as the need for proper technological support, for controlled studies demonstrating reliable positive or negative results of using specific game elements in particular educational contexts, etc. Although most of the reviewed papers report promising results, more substantial empirical research is needed to determine whether both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of the learners can be influenced by gamification.
Humans and some other animals can autonomously generate action choices that contribute to solving complex problems. However, experimental investigations of the cognitive bases of human autonomy are ...challenging, because experimental paradigms typically constrain behaviour using controlled contexts, and elicit behaviour by external triggers. In contrast, autonomy and freedom imply unconstrained behaviour initiated by endogenous triggers. Here we propose a new theoretical construct of adaptive autonomy, meaning the capacity to make behavioural choices that are free from constraints of both immediate external triggers and of routine response patterns, but nevertheless show appropriate coordination with the environment. Participants (N = 152) played a competitive game in which they had to choose the right time to act, in the face of an opponent who punished (in separate blocks) either choice biases (such as always responding early), sequential patterns of action timing across trials (such as early, late, early, late…), or predictable action-outcome dependence (such as win-stay, lose-shift). Adaptive autonomy was quantified as the ability to maintain performance when each of these influences on action selection was punished. We found that participants could become free from habitual choices regarding when to act and could also become free from sequential action patterns. However, they were not able to free themselves from influences of action-outcome dependence, even when these resulted in poor performance. These results point to a new concept of autonomous behaviour as flexible adaptation of voluntary action choices in a way that avoids stereotypy. In a sequential analysis, we also demonstrated that participants increased their reliance on belief learning in which they attempt to understand the competitor's beliefs and intentions, when transition bias and reinforcement bias were punished. Taken together, our study points to a cognitive mechanism of adaptive autonomy in which competitive interactions with other agents could promote both social cognition and volition in the form of non-stereotyped action choices.
We elucidate that a Boltzmann-like income distribution will emerge spontaneously in a long-run Arrow–Debreu economy, which is used to describe the well-functioning market economy. The emergence of ...such an income distribution can be regarded as a result of maximizing the entropy of the long-run Arrow–Debreu economy, which measures the extent of choice-freedom of permissible collective decisions offered to social members. By analyzing household income data of the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2015, we observe that the income structure of a market-economy country consists of three parts: super-low income class (i.e., unemployed households), low- and middle-income class, and top income class. The empirical analyses show that the low- and middle-income class (about 90%∼95% of populations) exactly obeys the Boltzmann-like income distribution. By contrast, top income class and super-low income class undermine the setting for Arrow–Debreu economy, and therefore do not conform to the Boltzmann-like distribution.
•Long-run Arrow–Debreu economy generates multiple general equilibria.•Boltzmann-like income distribution emerges spontaneously in a market economy.•The entropy of an economic society measures the extent of choice-freedom of social members.•Entropy law has potential significance for restricting collective behaviors of social members.•Technological progress factor is equivalent to the entropy of an economic society.
Nudging interventions are broadly defined as a rearrangement of a choice context that gently suggests a specific choice. Their increasing popularity has attracted attention and discussion from ...researchers, policy makers, and practitioners alike. After some applications to domains such as health, environmental issues, and retirement savings, the next step in nudging is to understand the psychological boundary conditions when applied to varied domains of daily life. It is yet unclear for example to what extent nudging interventions can be transparent without losing effectiveness, or how permanent the effects are. These unresolved questions may have contributed to heated political and scientific discussions, on for example the ethics of using nudges in the public health domain, due to the missing scientific evidence. Indeed, this popularity may have led to forget how nudging harnesses insights from decades of research in psychology to change people's behavior. The aim of this paper is to shift the focus back to the psychological premises nudges were built upon. It summarizes several outstanding questions that future research in the psychology of nudging should address. Advancing research in nudging will help to improve our understanding of applied nudging interventions and provide clarity to debates such as ethical appropriateness, effectiveness, and public approval.
Young children, like adults, understand that human agents can flexibly choose different actions in different contexts, and they evaluate these agents based on such choices. However, little is known ...about children's tendencies to attribute the capacity to choose to robots, despite increased contact with robotic agents. In this paper, we compare 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children's and adults’ attributions of free choice to a robot and to a human child by using a series of tasks measuring agency attribution, action prediction, and choice attribution. In morally neutral scenarios, children ascribed similar levels of free choice to the robot and the human, while adults were more likely to ascribe free choice to the human. For morally relevant scenarios, however, both age groups considered the robot's actions to be more constrained than the human's actions. These findings demonstrate that children and adults hold a nuanced understanding of free choice that is sensitive to both the agent type and constraints within a given scenario.
Cyclic dominance has become a pivotal factor in sustaining cooperation within structured populations. However, this comprehension has predominantly revolved around node dynamics, where agents are ...constrained to adopt a uniform strategy with all neighbors. This constraint restricts agents’ capabilities to respond differently to various neighbors. In this study, we explore the under-emphasized role of freedom of choice in spatial games, applying a voluntary prisoner’s dilemma model across diverse network structures. We differentiate between ‘node agents,’ who adhere to a consistent strategy with all neighbors, and ‘link agents,’ who adjust their strategies based on specific interactions, influenced by direct and indirect emotional factors. Direct emotion governs the strategy between two interacting agents, while indirect emotion encompasses the impact of third-party influences on strategic decisions. Our Monte Carlo simulations reveal that freedom of choices disrupts cyclic dominance establishment – particularly as the proportion of link agents grows – and influences the evolution of cooperation in nuanced ways. Specifically, a minor preference for upstream strategy delivery markedly promotes cooperation, while a strong preference diminishes it. Our findings suggest that the importance of cyclic dominance in promoting cooperation may have been overestimated, revealing that cooperation can flourish with varied strategies even in the absence of strong cyclic dominance.
Violation of local realism with freedom of choice Scheidl, Thomas; Ursin, Rupert; Kofler, Johannes ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
11/2010, Letnik:
107, Številka:
46
Journal Article
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Bell’s theorem shows that local realistic theories place strong restrictions on observable correlations between different systems, giving rise to Bell’s inequality which can be violated in ...experiments using entangled quantum states. Bell’s theorem is based on the assumptions of realism, locality, and the freedom to choose between measurement settings. In experimental tests, “loopholes” arise which allow observed violations to still be explained by local realistic theories. Violating Bell’s inequality while simultaneously closing all such loopholes is one of the most significant still open challenges in fundamental physics today. In this paper, we present an experiment that violates Bell’s inequality while simultaneously closing the locality loophole and addressing the freedom-of-choice loophole, also closing the latter within a reasonable set of assumptions. We also explain that the locality and freedom-of-choice loopholes can be closed only within nondeterminism, i.e., in the context of stochastic local realism.
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