Training for attentional control in dual task settings: A comparison of young and old adults.

The authors examined whether the learning and performance of dual tasks by young and old adults could be enhanced through training. Adults were trained with either a fixed-priority or variable-priority training strategy on a monitoring task and an alphabet-arithmetic task and then transferred to a scheduling and a paired-associates running memory task. Participants in the variable priority condition learned the monitoring and alphabet-arithmetic tasks more quickly and achieved a higher level of mastery on these tasks than did those in the fixed-priority condition. Moreover, participants trained with the variable priority technique showed evidence of the development of automatic processing and a more rapid rate of learning and higher level of mastery of the transfer tasks than did the fixed-priority participants. These results are discussed in terms of the mechanisms that underlie learning and performance of dual tasks and with respect to potential applications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The computation of orientation statistics from visual texture

This paper examines how observers estimate the overall orientation of spatially disorganised textures containing variable orientation. Experiments used asymmetrical distributions of orientations to separate the predictions from different models of average orientation estimation. Stimuli were composed of two spatially intermingled sets of oriented patches, each set having Gaussian distributed element orientation. The threshold separation of the means of the two sets was determined for a variety of tasks. Discrimination of these textures from a reference composed of two sets with the same mean orientation was well predicted by discrimination of orientation variability. A single interval judgement of which set contained more elements required a greater separation of the set orientations and suggested that the sets must be resolved in the orientation domain for independent representation of their properties. That resolution is required to perform this task further suggests that orientational skew is not coded. Threshold offsets for judgement of average orientation were re-expressed as shifts of four candidate features for coding the central tendency of texel orientations. Comparison with similar thresholds for single distributions of orientations indicated that average orientation is assigned to the centroid of a set of orientation measures.     

Goal orientations and performance: Differential relationships across levels of analysis and as a function of task demands.

Goal orientation and self-regulation theories were integrated to develop a multilevel framework aimed at addressing controversies regarding the magnitude and direction of goal orientation effects on performance. In Study 1, goal orientations were measured repeatedly whilst individuals performed an air traffic control task. In Study 2, goal orientations and exam performance were measured across 3 time points while undergraduates completed a course. Mastery-approach orientation was positively related to performance at the intraindividual level, but not at the interindividual level, and its effect was not moderated by task demands. Performance-approach positively predicted performance at the interindividual level, and at the intraindividual level, the direction of its effect switched as a function of task demands. Performance-avoid negatively predicted performance at the interindividual level but did not emerge as an intraindividual predictor. Mastery-avoid did not relate to performance at either level of analysis. This consistent pattern across 2 studies suggests that levels of analysis and task demands can determine the magnitude and direction of goal orientation effects on performance and highlights avenues for theory development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of irrelevant stimulus orientation on visually guided grasping movements.

The present study investigated the effects of irrelevant stimulus orientation on visually guided grasping movements. Participants had to grasp a rectangular object at either the ends or the sides, depending on the color of a visual stimulus. In this task, correspondence between stimulus orientation and object orientation (stimulus-object congruency) and correspondence between stimulus orientation and hand orientation (stimulus-hand congruency) varied independently. Two experiments, with different sets of object orientations, revealed a consistent pattern of results. In particular, there were significant effects of stimulus-hand congruency, suggesting that perceiving an object activates congruently oriented hand movements. However, stimulus-object congruency had no effects, indicating that participants did not benefit from a preactivation of object orientation in the present task. The pattern of congruency effects implies that the cognitive representation, which is affected by irrelevant visual information, entails only those object or response features that are needed to select and control a response. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Improvement in Vernier acuity in adults with amblyopia. Practice makes better

PURPOSE: To determine the nature and limits of visual improvement through repetitive practice in human adults with naturally occurring amblyopia. METHODS: A key measure the authors used was a psychophysical estimate of Vernier acuity; persons with amblyopia have marked deficits in Vernier acuity that are highly correlated with their loss of Snellen acuity. The experiment consisted of three phases: pretraining measurements of Vernier acuity and a second task (either line-detection thresholds or Snellen acuity) in each eye with the lines at two orientations; a training phase in which observers repetitively trained on the Vernier task at a specific line orientation until each had completed 4000 to 5000 trials; and posttraining measurements (identical to those in the first phase). Two groups of amblyopic observers were tested: novice observers (n = 6), who had no experience in making psychophysical judgments with their amblyopic eyes, and experienced observers (n = 5), who had previous experience in making Vernier judgments with their amblyopic eyes (with the lines at a different orientation) using the signal-detection methodology. RESULTS: The authors found that strong and significant improvement in Vernier acuity occurs in the trained orientation in all observers. Learning was generally strongest at the trained orientation but may partially have been transferred to other orientations (n = 4). Significant learning was transferred partially to the other eye (at the trained orientation) in two observers with anisometropic amblyopia. Improvement in Vernier acuity did not transfer to an untrained detection task. In two observers, the improvement in Vernier acuity was accompanied by a commensurate improvement in Snellen acuity. CONCLUSIONS: Some adults with amblyopia retain a significant degree of neural plasticity. Although several observers (primarily novices) showed evidence of generalized learning, several amblyopic patients showed evidence for improvement that was orientation and task specific. In this latter group of observers, the improvement appeared to reflect alterations that were, at least in part, in early neural processes that were orientation specific and were localized beyond the site of convergence of the two eyes.     

On the regulation of cognitive control: Action orientation moderates the impact of high demands in Stroop interference tasks.

Previous research has established that people vary in action orientation, a tendency toward decisiveness and initiative, versus state orientation, a tendency toward indecisiveness and hesitation (J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann, 1994b). In the present 3 studies, the authors examined whether action orientation versus state orientation regulates cognitive control under demanding conditions. Under high demands, action-oriented participants displayed better cognitive control than did state-oriented participants in a Stroop color naming task (Studies 1-3). No similar effects were found under low demands (Studies 2-3). Functional differences between action- and state-oriented participants emerged especially when the task included a high proportion of congruent Stroop trials (Study 3). These findings suggest that action-oriented individuals are better protected against goal neglect than are state-oriented individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of attention in the maintenance of feature bindings in visual short-term memory.

This study examined the role of attention in maintaining feature bindings in visual short-term memory. In a change-detection paradigm, participants attempted to detect changes in the colors and orientations of multiple objects; the changes consisted of new feature values in a feature-memory condition and changes in how existing feature values were combined in a binding-memory condition. In the critical experiment, a demanding visual search task requiring sequential shifts of spatial attention was interposed during the delay interval of the change-detection task. If attention is more important for the maintenance of feature bindings than for the maintenance of unbound feature values, the attention-requiring search task should specifically disrupt performance in the binding-memory task. Contrary to this proposal, it was found that memory for bindings and memory for features were equally impaired by the search task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Multilevel Analysis of Effort, Practice, and Performance: Effects; of Ability, Conscientiousness, and Goal Orientation.

This article examines the relationship between motivation and performance during skill acquisition. The authors used multilevel analysis to investigate relationships at within- and between-person levels of analysis. Participants were given multiple trials of practice on an air traffic control task. Measures of effort intensity and performance were taken at repeated intervals. As expected, the relationship between effort and performance increased with practice. Furthermore, the rate at which this effect strengthened was faster for individuals with high-ability or low-performance orientation. There was also an interaction between learning and performance orientations that only emerged after practice. By the end of practice, the negative effects of performance orientation were stronger for individuals with high learning orientation. Results highlight the importance of adopting a multilevel framework to enhance understanding of the link between motivation and performance (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of attention training on a behavioral test of contamination fears in individuals with subclinical obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

In the current study, we evaluated the effectiveness of attention training in individuals with subclinical obsessive-compulsive symptoms. We hypothesized that after completing attention training, participants would be more likely to complete steps in a hierarchy approaching their feared contaminant compared with participants in the control condition. Participants completed a probe detection task by identifying letters replacing one member of a pair of words (neutral or contamination related). We trained attention by building a contingency between the location of the contamination-related word in the active condition and not in the control condition. Participants in the active group showed a significant reduction in attention bias for threat and completed significantly more steps when approaching their feared objects compared with participants in the control group. Our results suggest that attention disengagement training may facilitate approaching feared objects in individuals with obsessive-compulsive symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Directed forgetting of emotional stimuli in borderline personality disorder.

On the basis of clinical literature, the authors hypothesized that individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) would show biased information processing when they were exposed to negative affective stimuli of a particular type. Individuals with BPD and controls were tested using a directed forgetting paradigm. Study participants were exposed to 3 types of words (borderline, neutral, positive) and were cued to either remember or forget each word as it was presented. There were no group differences on a free recall task for words in the remember condition. However, participants with BPD recalled significantly more of the borderline words from the forget condition than did controls. In other words, borderline participants remembered borderline words that they were instructed to forget. These results may be consistent with enhanced encoding of salient words and perhaps related themes in BPD individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dynamic illusion effects in a reaching task: Evidence for separate visual representations in the planning and control of reaching.

The effects of an orientation illusion on perception and 2 different actions were investigated. An 8-cm?×?2-cm cylindrical bar was placed in front of participants at various orientations. A background grating was used to induce an orientation illusion. In a perception task, the illusion affected participants' ability to align the bar with their sagittal planes. In one reaching task, a similar effect of the illusion was found on the choice between 2 possible grasping postures. In a second reaching task involving a single grasping posture, the orientation illusion affected the orientation of the hand at the beginning of the reach but not near its end. The authors argue that reaching trajectories are planned and initiated through a context-dependent representation but are corrected on-line through a context-independent representation. The relation of this model to a more general dichotomy between perception and action is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rumination and impaired resource allocation in depression.

Depression is characterized by a range of cognitive deficits that theorists posit are due to the resource capturing properties of rumination. The present study was designed to examine the relation between rumination and resource allocation in depression. Twenty-five depressed and 25 nondepressed participants completed a modified dual-task version of the recency-probes task, which assesses the controlled allocation of cognitive resources by comparing performance across low- and high-interference conditions. In low-interference conditions, participants performed either the recency-probes task or a tracking task, which required participants to track specific stimuli across trials (i.e., no dual-task interference). In the high-interference condition, participants performed both the recency-probes task and the tracking task, which required the controlled allocation of resources to resolve dual-task interference. Depressed participants performed significantly worse than did their nondepressed counterparts in only the high-interference condition; performance of the 2 groups was comparable in the low-interference conditions. Furthermore, the degree to which depressed participants were impaired in the high-interference condition was correlated .74 with rumination. These findings suggest that an association between rumination and impairments in resource allocation underlies the cognitive difficulties experienced by depressed individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context effects in left-right shape discrimination.

The difficulty of discriminating between left–right orientations of a shape has usually been attributed to symmetrical coding in the brain or to the nature of perceptual learning. However, recent work on the context-dependent nature of the difficulty challenges such explanations and supports a more cognitive approach to the problem. The present work examined the basis for left–right difficulty in the standard two-choice task (stimuli aligned side by side) in children of 3 to 4 years. Experiment 1 found that children who learned the task with the easy, single-stimulus procedure could generalize to the difficult, two-choice task. Subsequent experiments found that the difficulty in learning the two-choice task could not be attributed to the attentional demands of the two stimuli, nor to the use of the second stimulus as a spatial referent for defining orientation. The data suggested that the standard two-choice task is difficult because it promotes the use of two competing orientation judgments. We conclude that the difficulty of left–right judgments lies in the cognitive demands of the task and is to be understood in the same terms as other problems in cognitive development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia.

Two experiments examined the link between interpretation and memory in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Social Phobia (GSP). In Experiment 1, GSP and control participants generated continuations for nonsocial and ambiguous social scenarios. GSP participants produced more socially anxious and negative continuations for the social scenarios than did the controls. On the subsequent test of recalling the social scenarios, intrusion errors that shared meaning with the original continuations were made more frequently by the GSP group, producing false recall with emotionally negative features. To examine whether nonanxious individuals would also produce such errors if given emotional interpretations, in Experiment 2 the authors asked university students to read the scenarios plus endings produced by GSP participants in Experiment 1. The students either constructed vivid mental images of themselves as the main characters or thought about whether the endings provided closure. Low-anxious students in the closure condition produced fewer ending-based intrusions in recalling the social scenarios than did students in the other 3 conditions. Results illustrate the importance of examining the nature of source-monitoring errors in investigations of memory biases in social anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive mechanisms underlying implicit negative self concept in dysphoria.

Whereas explicit measures of the self-concept typically demonstrate a negative bias in depressed individuals, implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), revealed an opposite, positive bias. To address this inconsistent pattern, the authors examined, using a novel paradigm, mental set maintenance (i.e., the difficulty of maintaining active a required mental set) and set operation (the efficiency of executing the mental set while it is maintained). Dysphoric (N = 33) and nondysphoric (N = 30) participants alternated between an IAT focusing on self reference and a matched neutral task. Nondysphorics had greater difficulty in maintaining a negative self reference task compared to a neutral task. Conversely, dysphorics did not exhibit such difficulty, and they maintained a negative self-reference task more easily than nondysphorics. No group differences were evinced in smoothness of set operation. These results suggest that the shield protecting nondysphorics from maintaining negative mental sets is absent in dysphorics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effectiveness of supported education for individuals with psychiatric disabilities: results from an experimental study

In recent years post-secondary education has been recognized as a viable option in the psychosocial rehabilitation of individuals with mental illness. This study reports the first evidence of effectiveness of a supported education demonstration project which used an experimental design to compare the effects of different model types. A total of 397 participants were assigned to one of three conditions: group, classroom, and individual (control). At graduation from the program significant differences in program participation rates were found; group members participated most, followed by classroom participants, then those assigned to the individual condition. Also, immediate, intermediate, and long term outcomes were examined. On four immediate outcomes (motivation, satisfaction, enjoyment, and learning) significant participation effects were found (high participants scoring highest, followed by moderate participants, and then non-participants). On two intermediate outcome (empowerment and school efficacy) condition differences were found (classroom scoring highest followed by group, then individual). Although no condition differences were found on behavioral outcomes, the percentage of individuals enrolled in school or vocational education was more than twice that reported at baseline. Overall, the results demonstrated success in engaging participants, affecting self-perceptions, and increasing enrollment in post-secondary education.     

Concurrent discrimination learning in Parkinson’s disease.

Studies of neuropsychological patients and experimental animals have demonstrated that the striatum plays a role in implicit habit learning. Here, we examined the performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) on a concurrent discrimination task that can be learned implicitly by neurologically intact individuals. Participants viewed a pair of shapes on each trial and, under a timed deadline, guessed which one concealed a smiling face. About half the control participants exhibited minimal awareness of the cue–reward relationships as assessed by a post-test evaluation. Nevertheless, these participants were able to perform the discrimination task; there was no correlation between awareness and performance on the task. In contrast, minimally aware patients with PD showed no learning, whereas those who were more aware of the relationships performed as well as control participants on the task. There was a significant correlation between awareness and performance in patients with PD. These data support the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in implicit habit learning and underscore the importance of using tests of awareness to assess the content and process of learning in humans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of academic achievement: The interaction of children's achievement orientations with skill area.

Proposes a motivational analysis to help account for individual (e.g., sex) differences in different academic areas (e.g., mathematical vs verbal areas). It is proposed that certain academic areas (e.g., mathematics) are more likely than others (e.g., verbal) to pose difficulties at the start of new units and that the necessity of surmounting difficulties favors certain achievement orientations. To test the hypothesis that children's academic orientations interact with the acquisition demands of academic material to determine performance, 57 male and 37 female 5th graders, who were classified as helpless or mastery oriented on the basis of their attributions, were assigned to 1 of 2 learning conditions. One condition involved programmed confusion during learning, while the other was a no-confusion condition. When the learning task contained somewhat confusing material in the initial sections (even though it was irrelevant to what was to be learned), Ss with a mastery oriented attributional style significantly outperformed those with a helpless style. However, when the identical task was presented without the confusing material, both groups learned with equal facility. Results support the notion that achievement differences can result from the fit between children's achievement orientations and the demands of particular skill areas. (44 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Deficits in complex motor functions, despite no evidence of procedural learning deficits, among HIV+ individuals with history of substance dependence.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and drugs of abuse affect common neural systems underlying procedural memory, including the striatum. The authors compared performance of 48 HIV seropositive (HIV+) and 48 HIV seronegative (HIV-) participants with history of cocaine and/or heroin dependence across multiple Trial Blocks of three procedural learning (PL) tasks: Rotary Pursuit (RP), Mirror Star Tracing (MST), and Weather Prediction (WP). Groups were well matched on demographic, psychiatric, and substance use parameters, and all participants were verified abstinent from drugs. Mixed model analyses of variance revealed that the individuals in the HIV+ group performed more poorly across all tasks, with a significant main effect of HIV serostatus observed on the Mirror Star Tracing and a trend toward significance obtained for the Rotary Pursuit task. No significant differences were observed on the Weather Prediction task. Both groups demonstrated significant improvements in performance across all three procedural learning tasks. It is important to note that no significant Serostatus × Trial Block interactions were observed on any task. Thus, the individuals in the HIV+ group tended to perform worse than those in the HIV- group across all trial blocks of procedural learning tasks with motor demands, but showed no differences in their rate of improvement across all tasks. These findings are consistent with HIV--associated deficits in complex motor skills, but not in procedural learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Second-order parallel processing: Visual search for the odd item in a subset.

Visual search tasks in which participants searched for an odd element in a subset of items were investigated. Participants searched for an item of odd orientation in the red subset. The target was a red line of X°, distractors were green lines of X° and red lines of Y°. The orientations, X and Y, changed on every trial. In this task, orientation information was useful only after color had been used to select the relevant subset. Results show that response time (RT) and error data were different from standard color X orientation conjunction searches (Experiment 1). RT?×?Set Size functions had slopes near 0 ms per item (Experiment 2). The selection of the subset appeared to take 200-300 ms (Experiments 2 and 3). Subset selection was based on properties of the relevant subset, not the irrelevant subset (Experiment 4). It was more difficult (perhaps impossible) to select a subset defined by 2 colors (Experiment 5). Random variation in an irrelevant dimension did not disrupt subset search (Experiment 6). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)