A design that included both microgenetic and cross-sectional components was used to examine 135 Slovenian children's acquisition of matrix completion proficiency and compare microgenetic and age-related changes on the task. The microgenetic analyses indicated that children's errors became increasingly variable shortly before they discovered the correct strategy, that the correct strategy became dominant quite quickly following its initial use, that improvements in matrix completion performance generalized to conservation, and that amount of learning correlated positively with IQ. The microgenetic/cross-sectional comparison, which involved contrasting the changes that occurred over seven experimental sessions with the changes that occurred between ages 6 and 7 years, indicated that the two patterns of change were highly similar.

Objective: To identify the prevalence of and to determine the risk factors for developing a fear of childbirth (tokophobia). Methods: We evaluated 191 pregnant women during Parenting and Childbirth Classes. Participants were approached when attending Parenting and Childbirth Classes between June 2014 and September 2014 and were asked to complete several questionnaires related to depression (CES-D), anxiety (STAI X1 and X2), satisfaction with life (SWLS), delivery expectation/experience (W-DEQ), and specific fears. Results: Most (90%) of the responders were nulliparous. As many as 75% of the participants reported low to moderate tokophobia, whereas 25% exhibited high or very high fear of childbirth. Pathological fear occurred in 1.6% of the participants. The most significant was the fear of having an episiotomy followed by fear of having no control on the situation and fear of pain. An association exists between a preferred elective cesarean birth and tokophobia. Conclusions:The results draw attention to the need for early detection and treatment of fear of childbirth. The data may help identifying women at risk that require prenatal psychological intervention.

Learning of class inclusion by 5-year-olds in response to empirical and logical explanations of an adult's answers was examined. Contrary to the view that young children possess an empirical bias, 5-year-olds learned more, and continued learning for longer, when given logical explanations of correct answers than when given empirical explanations. Once children discovered how to solve the problems, they showed few regressions. Many children in the microgenetic experiment followed the path of change anticipated from previous cross-sectional studies, but children in the cross-sectional part of the study seemed to follow a different path. Reasons for the superior effectiveness of the logical explanations were discussed.

The data clearly supported the claim that driving performance changes steadily across age groups: both mean reaction time and interindividual variability progressively increase with age. In addition, a significant group of older drivers was identified who did not show the expected age-related decrease in performance. The findings have important implications, suggesting that in relation to driving, aging is a progressive phenomenon and may lead to variety of driving performance; age-related studies of driving performance should put more emphasis on investigating changes across the whole driver age range rather than only comparing younger and older drivers.

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This study provides an interdisciplinary account determining how children and adolescents understand urban and architectural aspects of sustainable development. The concept of sustainability implies complex relations between ethical, economical, social, technical and other qualities of our environment. The concept is difficult to understand for children who lack the abilities of abstract reasoning and multi-dimensional thinking. A new measure of sustainability understanding was formed based on pictorial rather than textual format and was applied to a large sample of over 2000 participants aged 6-19 years. The results indicated that girls had higher levels of appreciation toward sustainability issues than boys. The results also showed that understanding of sustainability issues increased progressively with age, particularly with adolescents from urban environments. The findings are discussed in terms of cognitive changes in adolescence and their implications for educational policy.

This paper is intended to give an overview of the experiments to evaluate the cognitive load of the officer on watch (OOW) during a collision avoidance maneuver in a full-mission simulator. The main goal is to investigate the possibilities of recording the biometric parameters of an OOW during a simulated collision avoidance maneuver. Potentially dangerous navigation errors known as human erroneous action (HEA) are induced by excessive cognitive load. Despite modern navigational aids on the ship’s bridge, investigators of maritime incidents typically link the reason for incidents at sea with human factors, including high cognitive load. During the experimental tasks on the bridge, the biometric parameters of the OOW are recorded. Statistical tools are used to visualize the data and evaluate the cognitive load of the OOW. Biometric peaks of the OOW typically occur either during the collision avoidance maneuver or when the OOW has been exposed to disturbing factors that increase reaction time and cause potentially dangerous navigation. Assessing the cognitive load of OOWs in the simulator is challenging for several reasons: e.g., the environmental conditions of the simulator, the type of task to be simulated, and even the type of sensor used. After careful study of the available literature, an original experimental design using non-invasive biometric sensors is proposed.

The rapid evolution of information and communications technologies has brought the potential held by urban analytics up to a higher level and thus promises more well-informed decisions, including advances in the assessment methodologies and monitoring based on existing data and its reuse. The paper provides an insight into an ongoing national research project examining the assessment methodologies and data integration for the purpose of monitoring the progress as regards sustainability and quality in urban environments. Specifically, we focus on the level of the neighbourhoods; by measuring the extent to which the built environment comprehends the required characteristics and configuration for efficiency, or contribute to quality living and sustainability. Current study covers the aspect of efficient mobility and connectivity, revealing the potential of the location-based data provided by mobile devices and associated infrastructures. While such data are widely recognised as a beneficial source of information in various fields and solid advances have been made in both analytics and modelling, little progresses has been seen in exploiting that potential as regards sustainability assessment tools. This study examines the viability of indicators addressing travel time reliability throughout the empirical testbed, exemplified by six strategic routes associated with three neighbourhoods in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The paper summarizes current progress of the study.   Received: 21 January 2021 / Accepted: 22 March 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021