Growth and allocation of resources within the APA.

"As an organization of individual members, our first major source of income derives from membership dues." Major sections are: Growth in Income, Expense, and Membership; History of Dues Increases; The Journal Operations; Annual Allocation of Resources; External Grants and Contracts; Additional Operations; and Conclusion. "Just as 1962 represented our first budgeted years of over $1,000,000 in both income and expenses, 1963 will see a membership in excess of 20,000." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Risky decision making and allocation of resources for leukemia and AIDS programs.

Expanded traditional judgment and decision-making paradigms to include differential reactions to persons with leukemia or AIDS. Exps 1 and 2 adopted A. Tversky and D. Kahneman's risky-decision-making task and found support for different value functions for the 2 patient groups when choosing between treatment programs. From these results, the subjective value of saving a fixed number of lives appears to be greater for persons with leukemia than for persons with AIDS. Exp 3 provided additional data concerning differential perceptions of the causes of AIDS. This proved to be a useful means of classifying Ss who did and did not devalue the lives of persons with AIDS. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Statistical learning induces discrete shifts in the allocation of working memory resources.

Observers can voluntarily select which items are encoded into working memory, and the efficiency of this process strongly predicts memory capacity. Nevertheless, the present work suggests that voluntary intentions do not exclusively determine what is encoded into this online workspace. Observers indicated whether any items from a briefly stored sample display had changed. Unbeknown to observers, these changes were most likely to occur in a specific quadrant of the display (the dominant quadrant). Across 84 subjects and 5 groups of observers, change detection accuracy was significantly higher for items in the dominant quadrant, suggesting that memory encoding was biased towards the dominant quadrant. Only 9 of the 84 subjects were able to correctly specify the dominant quadrant when asked whether any location was more likely to contain the changed item, but more sensitive forced-choice procedures did reveal above-chance discrimination of the dominant quadrant. Nevertheless, because forced choice performance was unrelated to the size of the bias and no observer reported a biased encoding strategy, the bias was unlikely to depend on voluntary encoding strategies. The encoding bias was not due to a reduction in the response threshold for indicating changes in the dominant quadrant (Experiment 2). Finally, separate measures of the number and resolution of the representations in memory suggested that encoding was biased in a discrete slot-based fashion (Experiment 3). That is, although items in the dominant quadrant were more likely to be encoded into memory, mnemonic resolution for the favored items was not affected. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Autonomic orienting and the allocation of processing resources in schizophrenia patients and putatively at-risk individuals.

The differential allocation of attentional resources to attended and ignored stimuli was examined by measuring skin conductance orienting responses and secondary reaction time in relatively asymptomatic schizophrenia outpatients, demographically matched normal controls, college students putatively at risk for psychosis, and a college student control group. At-risk participants were those with extreme scores on scales for either anhedonia or perceptual aberration-magical ideation (per-mags). Compared to control groups, the patients and per-mags showed secondary reaction time results suggesting a delay in the differential allocation of attentional resources. This deficit was observed particularly in patients and matched controls with few or no skin conductance orienting responses, suggesting that impaired autonomic orienting is related to underlying cognitive-attentional vulnerability factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional systems and the allocation of cerebral resources in reading and grammatical tasks

To evaluate the possible role of attentional centers as modulators of neural networks that mediate visual tasks involving reading and grammatical manipulations of verbs, we measured cerebral blood flow (CBF) using positron emission tomography (PET), and reaction times as subjects read verbs, "nonce verbs" such as jelt or brep, and formed past tenses of regular, irregular and nonce verbs after viewing their stems. Statistical parametric maps (SPMs) showed significant activation of the pulvinar in the read verb irregular, and generate nonce past tense tasks, compared to rest. This was confirmed by a post hoc ANOVA of CBF values from a discrete locus in the pulvinar (p = .0000417). Functional links between the pulvinar and other brain regions were shown by high correlations of CBF in the pulvinar with CBF in brain regions known to have anatomical connections to the pulvinar, particularly those mediating vision. There was also a significant relationship between task-specific reaction times and rest minus task CBF differences in a multiple regression analysis that included CBF values from the pulvinar, superior colliculus plus reticular formation, and the anterior cingulate, known attentional centers (p = .021, r2 = 0.99). Regression analyses relating reaction time to the amount of brain activated (pixels in the SPMs) and the degree of activation of the pixels (mean Z score) yielded p values of .078 and .074, respectively. Our data provide direct experimental evidence to support the hypothesis that attentional centers are activated in proportion to the complexity of visually mediated language tasks and that the centers that mediate attention modulate the activity of task-specific neural networks.     

Does self-regulation require cognitive resources? Evaluation of resource allocation models of goal setting.

The resource allocation model of goal setting (R. Kanfer & P. L. Ackerman, 1989) maintains that self-regulation initiated through goal setting requires attentional resources that could be more productively applied to skill acquisition and complex task performance. The current study questioned this hypothesis because attentional resources had not been directly manipulated or measured in studies supporting the model. Thus, alternative explanations that are based on other complex task goal-setting models cannot be excluded. As a direct test of the resource allocation hypothesis, dual task methodology was used to measure the attentional resource requirements of self-regulation. Even at the limits of human information processing, participants who were assigned difficult, specific goals performed at least as well on the secondary task as did individuals with do-your-best goals. These findings suggest that self-regulation does not necessarily require attentional resources. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The ethical allocation of scarce resources in surgery: implants and cost

This paper is a discussion of the factors involved in instituting a bulk purchasing program for surgical supplies. An improved understanding of the surgical procedure of joint arthroplasty must relate to the variability in surgical methods that achieve patient outcomes. An understanding of the outcomes in relation to the expected duration of the success of an implant and the high costs associated with a revision earlier than expected must be factored into the budget and costs of implants. The ethical implications of choosing one implant over another are considered. A more uniform outcome assessment with respect to surgical activities is needed and potential savings related to other operating-room costs must be examined. Optimizing the implant to patient requirements is the goal within the framework of current fiscal constraints.     

钢铁企业生产资源优化配置决策支持系统研究

为了使钢铁企业生产过程能够及时响应市场需求的变化,提出了"以效定产"的生产经营策略,基于"以效定产"概念,探讨了生产资源优化配置决策支持系统的基本需求、系统结构和系统功能。系统能根据市场需求和企业生产能力约束,在综合考虑经济效益、综合成材率以及设备利用率的前提下,对生产资源进行优化配置。通过介绍决策支持系统在包头钢铁(集团)有限责任公司生产中的离线测试,对其作用与效果进行了分析评价。     

Aging, dementia and care: setting limits on the allocation of health care resources to the aged

This article explores the ethical dimensions behind care of the elderly and considers whether younger people should be given priority over the aged in the provision of health care resources. It is argued that age is a relevant consideration in decisions concerning the allocation of health care. The notions of a 'natural life span' and a 'tolerable death' are discussed and on this basis I conclude that while the interests and claims of the elderly must be protected, the use of unlimited resources in the pursuit of life extending measures cannot be justified. When traditional ethical principles are applied to care of the aged they have to be viewed in a modified fashion. The nature of dementia is such that integrity in caregiving has to take account of the patient's premorbid self. I argue that the morally appropriate response to demented patients excludes acute-care, life-extending medicine, but neither does it advocate active euthanasia. The aim is to find a middle ground between treating the demented too aggressively and failing to give them sufficient treatment.     

Causality and the allocation of attention during comprehension.

Recent research has suggested that each statement in a narrative text is understood by relating it to its causal antecedents and consequences and that the text as a whole is understood by finding a causal path linking its opening to its final outcome. C. R. Fletcher and C. P. Bloom (see record 1989-10829-001) have proposed that in order to accomplish this goal, while minimizing the number of times long-term memory has to be searched, readers focus their attention on the last clause of a narrative that has causal antecedents but no consequences in the preceding text. As a result, a statement that is followed by a causal antecedent should remain the focus of attention, while the same statement followed by a consequence should not. This prediction was tested and confirmed in three experiments which show that when a target statement is followed by a sentence that includes only causal antecedents (a) continuation sentences related to it are read more quickly, (b) target words drawn from it are easier to recognize, and (c) subject-generated continuations are more likely to be causally related to it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resource allocation and the attentional demands of letter encoding.

Evaluated evidence provided by W. C. Ogden et al (see record 1981-11851-001) against encoding automaticity when the 1st letter is not terminated after a brief exposure. Seven studies were conducted using 105 undergraduates. Evidence of encoding interference was found in the 1st 2 studies when the interval between the 2 letters was varied (50–2,000 msec), but this interference disappeared when there was a constant 1,000-msec interval between letters. On the basis of these findings, it was hypothesized that any momentary reduction in the resources demanded by the primary task would result in a real allocation of resources to the secondary task, which in turn would reduce the sensitivity of the secondary task to the demands of the primary one. This was tested by reducing resource allocation to the probe task at the time of encoding by reducing the expectancy (i.e., the probability) of probes in the temporal proximity of the 1st letter. This manipulation produced a large and significant increase in encoding interference. When the intensity of the tone (probe) was decreased from 70 to 60 db, the magnitude of encoding interference was further increased. Findings suggest that the magnitude of secondary task interference depends on within-trial changes in resource allocation between primary and secondary tasks. This possibility has general implications for dual-task methodology and the measurement of attentional demands. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex differences in the allocation of pay.

Examined the possibility that relative to males, females perceive less of a connection between their work and monetary rewards. In Study 1, 66 females and 60 males (respondents to an advertisement in a student newspaper) determined either their own pay or the pay of another person. Results support the hypothesis in that females paid themselves less than did males and less than other people (males or females) paid females. Results also suggest that Ss were more generous when they paid females. In Study 2, sex differences in self-pay were examined in 80 1st-, 4th-, 7th-, and 10th-grade Ss. Results replicate those of Study 1, in that at every grade level, females paid themselves less than did males. In addition, the extent to which females allocated pay the way their male counterparts did was highly related to the masculinity of their career goals. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making choices in hospital resources allocation. The use of an assessment tool to decide which new projects are financed

This paper reviews the use of in vitro and in vivo antimutagenicity studies that determined the role of plant peroxidases in the activation of arylamine promutagens. New information presented here suggests a model in which tobacco cell peroxidases exuded into the culture medium undergo a maturation process affecting their capacity to activate arylamine promutagens. Tobacco cell peroxidases are present in medium recovered from stationary phase cells and are associated with a fraction that sediments at 12000 x g. These peroxidases have a greater capacity to activate arylamines than do peroxidases present in the supernatant fluid. These data suggest that the plant activation of arylamines into products that are mutagenic in Salmonella typhimurium may be intimately involved in the process of lignification.     

Science and the world of imagination.

Discusses a stereotype of science and scientific teaching. It is argued that some of the great scientists have fudged their data, and theory is only remotely controlled by fact. Students are tacitly urged to learn as much as possible, and this is a mistake; especially in the present rapid growth of knowledge (e.g., retrograde amnesia and hypnosis) the student should memorize as little as possible. It is stressed that the real world can be known only as an imaginative construct. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Medical resources and the internet. Making the connection

The Internet has provided a new forum through which medical information can be obtained and discussed. We review methods available to take advantage of this resource and provide a glimpse of electronically available information and discussions. These methods are useful for beginning and experienced users of the Internet.     

Resource allocation and context utilization in the reading process.

Two experiments with 294 undergraduates studied the relationship between lower level code availability and top–down contextual processing in word recognition. The utility of context information was measured by a word boundary task, which required Ss to rapidly separate words from a uniformly spaced array of letters. Context was manipulated in terms of coherent vs random passage organization and the presence or absence of prior thematic framework information. Low-level code availability was impaired in a reversed orthographic condition as indicated by reduced performance rates compared with normal presentations. Results show that the increment in performance resulting from coherent organization relative to the random passage was equivalent in both normal and reversed orthographic forms. It appears that framework information can operate as an additional knowledge source to increase performance. (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Substitutability in time allocation.

Describes a method of measuring substitutability, using concurrent schedules of reinforcement. It is assumed that an animal allocates its time to maximize utility (according to a certain function) within the constraints imposed by the choice situation (the limited time available and the schedules of reinforcement). This assumption implies that when it chooses among various rates and amounts of a single reinforcer, the animal allocates time proportionally to the value of the alternatives (matching). But when the animal chooses among various rates and amounts of different reinforcers, its time allocation deviates from matching. This deviation provides a measure of the substitutability of the commodities. (53 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Science and television.

The "program that has only incidental visual support is certainly one of the most conspicuous and continuing failures of educational television." The major characteristic of the series "Focus on Behavior," a series of 10 30-minute films produced for National Educational Television under the auspices of APA "is the consistent presentation of experimental psychology by showing people doing things rather than by telling what has been done, giving conclusions, and then illustrating these through supporting visual demonstrations or examples." The "series represents a major step forward in the presentation of science." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)