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Fundamental Determinant (fundamental + determinant)
Selected AbstractsAssembly history dictates ecosystem functioning: evidence from wood decomposer communitiesECOLOGY LETTERS, Issue 6 2010Tadashi Fukami Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 675,684 Abstract Community assembly history is increasingly recognized as a fundamental determinant of community structure. However, little is known as to how assembly history may affect ecosystem functioning via its effect on community structure. Using wood-decaying fungi as a model system, we provide experimental evidence that large differences in ecosystem functioning can be caused by small differences in species immigration history during community assembly. Direct manipulation of early immigration history resulted in three-fold differences in fungal species richness and composition and, as a consequence, differences of the same magnitude in the rate of decomposition and carbon release from wood. These effects , which were attributable to the history-dependent outcome of competitive and facilitative interactions , were significant across a range of nitrogen availabilities observed in natural forests. Our results highlight the importance of considering assembly history in explaining ecosystem functioning. [source] Intellectual Disabilities and Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health: An Overview of ResearchJOURNAL OF APPLIED RESEARCH IN INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES, Issue 2 2005Hilary Graham Background, There is an enduring association between socioeconomic position and health, both over time and across major causes of death. Children and adults with intellectual disabilities are disproportionately represented among the poorer and less healthy sections of the population. But research on health inequalities, and on the broader societal influences on health, has yet to be integrated into perspectives and policy for people with intellectual disabilities. Methods, The paper reviews evidence on the patterns and causes of socioeconomic inequalities in health. Results, It points to evidence that socioeconomic position is the fundamental determinant of health, drawing on longitudinal studies to highlight how it exerts its influence on health from before birth and across the lifecourse. The factors shaping an individual's socioeconomic position are also discussed. Conclusions, The paper concludes by identifying research and policy challenges. [source] The role of importance/consequentiality appraisal in flashbulb memory formation: the case of the death of Pope John Paul IIAPPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2009Carla Tinti This study investigates how flashbulb memories (FBMs) relative to the death of Pope John Paul II vary according to the persons' evaluation of the event's importance and consequences. In particular, FBMs were investigated in persons who were expected to attribute different degrees of importance/consequentiality to the event as a function of two factors: (1) religious involvement, (2) nationality (Polish, Italian, Swiss). The comparison was made with respect to the following hypothesized determinants of FBMs: surprise, emotional reaction, rehearsal, event memory and especially the attitudes towards the Pope and the appraisal of the importance and the consequences of his death. Structural equation modelling indicates that importance/consequentiality is a fundamental determinant of FBM and is influenced by antecedent personal and social characteristics reflected in the person's attitudes. Moreover, memory consistency seems to be both directly influenced by emotional intensity and indirectly through rehearsal, whereas surprise seems not a critical determinant of FBM. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentenial ComplexityCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005Daniel Grodner Abstract All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs,more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This article presents 2 self-paced reading studies, which explore the hypothesis that dependency distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience-based models of complexity. Instead, this work supports the role of a memory bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relations must be recovered from a linear input stream. [source] | ||||||||||