The social intelligence hypothesis, which posits that the challenges of life in complex social environments drive cognitive evolution, enjoys widespread theoretical and empirical support. Recent years have seen the emergence of a novel variant of this hypothesis, suggesting that cooperative breeding is associated with the elaboration of socio-cognitive abilities. With this cooperative breeding ...

Literature about Industrial Districts has largely emphasized the importance of both economic and social factors in determining the competitiveness of these particular firms' clusters. For thirty years, the Industrial District productive and organizational model represented an alternative to the integrated model of fordist enterprise. Nowadays, the district model suffers from competitive gaps, l...

The increased diffusion of the Internet has made computer-mediated communication (CMC) very popular. However, a difficult question arises for psychologists and communication researchers: "What are the communicative characteristics of CMC?" According to the "cues-filtered-out" approach, CMC lacks the specifically relational features (social cues), which enable the interlocutors to identify corre...

The Socio-Cognitive Systems (SCS) Section at Defence Research and Development Canada—Toronto (DRDC Toronto) has undertaken a Technology Investment Fund (TIF) Project entitled “A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Armed Non-state Actors (ANSAs): Strategic Roles and Operational Dynamics.” The aim of this Project is to advance our understanding of (a) the strategic roles of ANSAs in the contex...

This paper reviews the literature about social and cognitive functions of spatial features used when collaborating in both physical and virtual settings. Those concepts come from various fields like social, cognitive as well as environmental psychology or CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work). We briefly summarize the social and cognitive affordances of spatial features like distance, pr...

Rebel agents are intelligent agents that can oppose goals or plans assigned to them, or the general attitudes and/or behavior of other agents. They can serve purposes such as ethics, safety, and task execution correctness; enhance social co-creativity, and provide or support diverse points of view. We previously proposed a framework for AI rebellion and explored various scenarios that have posi...

Promisingness Judgments as Facilitators of Knowledge Building in Elementary Science Bodong Chen Doctor of Philosophy Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto 2014 Recognizing promising ideas is an important component of expertise and creativity (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Csikszentmihalyi, 2009; Gardner, 1994). The goal ...

Most investigation into climate adaptation to date has focused on specific technological interventions and socio-economic aspects of adaptive capacity. New perspectives posit that socio-cognitive factors may be as or more important in motivating individuals to take adaptive actions. Recent research indicates that incorporating insights from motivation theory can enhance theorization of adaptive...

Recent educational research from a socio-cognitive perspective has validated students collaborative engagement with new technologies and heightened understanding of influential factors shaping the effectiveness of peer interactions, learning contexts and computer interfaces for enhancing learning. This paper focuses on an analysis of the complexity of knowledge in student-designed, electronical...

Despite much research on organizational factors affecting firms’ IT adoption and use, little attention has been paid to organizations’ stickiness to current processes although there were better IT innovations or incentives to switch. Against this backdrop, this research-in-progress paper explicitly conceptualizes and operationalizes organizational level inertia based on a rigorous scale develop...