Previous studies that explored the impact of task-related variables on translation performance focused on task complexity but reported inconsistent findings. This study shows that, to understand the effect of task complexity on translation process and its end product, performance in translation tasks of various complexity levels needs to be compared in a specific setting, in which more factors are considered besides task complexity—especially students’ translating self-efficacy belief. Data obtained from screen recording, subjective (...) rating, semi-structured interview, and quality evaluation were triangulated to measure how task complexity influenced the translation performance of Chinese students with high and low TSEB. We found that the complex task led to significantly longer task duration, greater self-reported cognitive effort, lower accuracy, and poorer fluency than the simple one among students, irrespective of their TSEB level. Besides, the high-TSEB group outperformed the low-TSEB group in translation accuracy and fluency in both tasks. However, the interaction effect of task complexity and TSEB was not significant, due possibly to weak problem awareness among students. Our study has implications for effectively designing task complexity, getting the benefits of TSEB, and improving research on translation performance. (shrink)

In a simple economic decision problem with multi-tasking the dimensionality of the problem is neither a necessary nor a sufficient measure of complexity. Rather, dimension is good measure of complexity when there is an aggregate resource constraint that creates an interaction between the different activities, resulting in a problem with high algorithmic complexity.

An application of the Method of Analysis of Relational Complexity (MARC) to suppositional reasoning in the knight-knave task is outlined. The task requires testing suppositions derived from statements made by individuals who either always tell the truth or always lie. Relational complexity (RC) is defined as the number of unique entities that need to be processed in parallel to arrive at a solution. A selection of five ternary and five quaternary items were presented to 53 psychology (...) students using a pencil and paper format. A computer-administered version was presented to 50 students. As predicted, quaternary problems were associated with higher error rates and longer response times than ternary problems. The computer-administered form was more difficult than the pencil and paper version of the test. These differences are discussed in terms of RC theory and alternative processing accounts. Together, they indicate that the relational complexity metric is a useful and parsimonious way to quantify complexity of reasoning tasks. (shrink)

In the real-world complex product design process, task allocating is an ongoing reactive process where the presence of unexpected design change is usually inevitable. Therefore, reallocating is necessary to respond to design change positively as a procedure to repair the affected task plan. General reallocating literature addressed the reallocating versions with fixed executing time. In this paper, a multi-objective reallocation model is developed with a feasible assumption that the task executing time is controllable. To illustrate this idea, (...) a compressing executing time strategy is proposed in CPD process, where the executing time can be controlled with a non-linear compression cost. When design change occurs during the executing, task-resource reallocating is required to absorb the interference effects. Reallocating implies an increase in design cost and system instability; the proposed method CETS can address this issue effectively. CETS considers three objectives: completing time, stability, and change-adaptation cost. An adaptive multi-objective hybrid genetic algorithm and tabu search is developed to solve this mathematical method. The computational results of specific simulation examples verify the superiority. It shows that CETS is sensitive to design change, and the proposed algorithm AMOGATS can be effective to achieve the allocating by coordinating the objective consistency. (shrink)

Theorizing about children’s early development is beset with interpretational complexities. I argue that there is a general tendency to over-interpret the experimental findings, and that one of the main causes of this is the difficulty of disengaging from our adult frame of reference when theorizing about the young child’s mind. One domain where this holds is children’s ability to differentiate themselves from others. In relation to this I first critically analyze some cases of interpretational complexities, and then apply my methodological (...) and conceptual concerns to children’s perspective-taking abilities. This has a specific bearing on the classical false-belief task, which is a perspective-taking task. Part II proposes a new, what I call, a ‘Piagetian reading’ of the false-belief test. My new interpretation of the test suggests two different ways of perspective-taking of which one is egocentric in Piaget’s sense. Concluding Part III elaborates on some implications of the proposed reading of the test for a number of findings in the Theory-of-Mind field. (shrink)

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, (...) and complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

The confusion/non-consequential thinking explanation proposed by Newstead, Girotto, and Legrenzi (1995) for poor performance on Wason's THOG problem (a hypothetico-deductive reasoning task) was examined in three experiments with 300 participants. In general, as the cognitive complexity of the problem and the possibility of non-consequential thinking were reduced, correct performance increased. Significant but weak facilitation (33-40% correct) was found in Experiment 1 for THOG classification instructions that did not include the indeterminate response option. Substantial facilitation (up to 75% correct) (...) was obtained in Experiment 2 with O'Brien et al.'s (1990) one-other-THOG classification instruction. In Experiment 3, a revised version of O'Brien et al.'s pre-test problem format also led to substantial facilitation, even with the use of the standard three-choice THOG classification instruction. These findings are discussed in terms of Newstead et al.'s theoretical proposal and possible attentional factors. (shrink)

Several gaze contingent studies that used a fixed delay between physical eye movements and a display change documented a dip in the fixation duration distributions (e.g., Blanchard et al. 1984; McConkie et al. 1985; van Diepen et al. 1995). In a study by van Diepen et al. (1995), a moving mask paradigm was employed in which subjects searched line drawings of everyday scenes for non-objects. The appearance of the mask was delayed relative to the end of a saccade (beginning of (...) fixation) by 17, 46, 76 or 121 msec. All fixation duration distributions in the masking conditions exhibited a dip with longer masking delays resulting in the dip occurring at longer fixation durations. In contrast, a no-mask condition did not produce a dip. Similar effects in reading were reported by Blanchard et al. (1984), and McConkie et al. (1985). In both these studies the text was.. (shrink)