The role of target–distractor relationships in guiding attention and the eyes in visual search.

Current models of visual search assume that visual attention can be guided by tuning attention toward specific feature values (e.g., particular size, color) or by inhibiting the features of the irrelevant nontargets. The present study demonstrates that attention and eye movements can also be guided by a relational specification of how the target differs from the irrelevant distractors (e.g., larger, redder, darker). Guidance by the relational properties of the target governed intertrial priming effects and capture by irrelevant distractors. First, intertrial switch costs occurred only upon reversals of the coarse relationship between target and nontargets, but they did not occur when the target and nontarget features changed such that the relation remained the same. Second, irrelevant distractors captured most strongly when they differed in the correct direction from all other items—despite the fact that they were less similar to the target. This suggests that priming and contingent capture, which have previously been regarded as prime evidence for feature-based selection, are really due to a relational selection mechanism. Here I propose a new relational vector account of guidance, which holds promise to synthesize a wide range of different findings that have previously been attributed to different mechanisms of visual search. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What are the fundamental facts of a comparison of two treatments' outcomes?

Responds to comments by Stefan G. Hofmann (see record 2011-19228-003), Edward A. Wise (see record 2011-19228-004), Michael J. Lambert (see record 2011-19228-005), and William H. Gottdiener (see record 2011-19228-006) on the authors original article "Statistical significance testing and clinical trials" (see record 2011-19228-002). The original article is one very narrowly focused effort at studying the implications of relying on the null hypothesis significance test (NHST) for determining which psychotherapy randomized clinical trial (RCT) findings to take seriously for clinical purposes. Although there are several approaches for faulting the NHST, the matter is important and complicated enough to justify dealing, in detail, with one approach at a time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Transsaccadic representation of layout: What is the time course of boundary extension?

How rapidly does boundary extension occur? Across experiments, trials included a 3-scene sequence (325 ms/picture), masked interval, and repetition of 1 scene. The repetition was the same view or differed (more close-up or wide angle). Observers rated the repetition as same as, closer than, or more wide angle than the original view on a 5-point scale. Masked intervals were 100, 250, 625, or 1,000 ms in Experiment 1 and 42, 100, or 250 ms in Experiments 2 and 3. Boundary extension occurred in all cases: Identical views were rated as too "close-up," and distractor views elicited the rating asymmetry typical of boundary extension (wider angle distractors were rated as being more similar to the original than were closer up distractors). Most important, boundary extension was evident when only a 42-ms mask separated the original and test views. Experiments 1 and 3 included conditions eliciting a gaze shift prior to the rating test; this did not eliminate boundary extension. Results show that boundary extension is available soon enough and is robust enough to play an on-line role in view integration, perhaps supporting incorporation of views within a larger spatial framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do response time limitations counteract the effect of faking on personality inventory validity?

Different models of lying on personality scales make discrepant predictions on the association between faking and item response time. The current research investigated response time restriction as a method for reducing the influence of faking on personality scale validity. In 3 assessment simulations involving 540 university undergraduates responding to 2 common, psychometrically strong personality inventories, no evidence emerged to indicate that limiting respondents' answering time can attenuate the effects of faking on validity. Results were interpreted as failing to support a simple model of personality test item response dissimulation that predicts that lying takes time. Findings were consistent with models implying that lying involves primitive cognitive processing or that lying may be associated with complex processing that includes both primitive responding and cognitive overrides. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What are affects?

In an attempt to answer the question, "what is affect?", this paper considers Freud's metapsychological formulation in the light of recent developments in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. It argues that the problem of affect-perhaps more than any other-forces us to acknowledge the intrinsic connexion between mind and body, and to accommodate it in our theoretical formulations. A review of the problem from this point of view leads to the following formulation: affect is a primary sensory modality, analogous to the senses of vision, hearing, somatic sensation, taste, and smell. These modalities are the elementary constituents of the envelope of consciousness, from which it is impossible to free ourselves. Whereas the sensory modalities of vision, hearing, somatic sensation, taste, and smell represent aspects of the external object world ("unknowable" in itself), affect is the primary sensory modality through which we perceive as aspect of the internal world of the subject ("unconscious" in itself).     

What are the benefits of mindfulness? A practice review of psychotherapy-related research.

Research suggests that mindfulness practices offer psychotherapists a way to positively affect aspects of therapy that account for successful treatment. This paper provides psychotherapists with a synthesis of the empirically supported advantages of mindfulness. Definitions of mindfulness and evidence-based interpersonal, affective, and intrapersonal benefits of mindfulness are presented. Research on therapists who meditate and client outcomes of therapists who meditate are reviewed. Implications for practice, research, and training are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

What are patients' expectations of tomorrow's physicians?

The question of the patient's expectation on his physician and through him on modern medicine has nowadays developed to surprising actuality. Four points are raised for reflection basing on historic analysis, empiric investigations and personal experience: 1. The expectations on the personal physician, the "eyewitness" of life. 2. The expectations on the physician as expert in diagnosis and treatment. 3. The expectations on the physician as companion through critical situations and as helper in need. 4. The expectation on a new patient-doctor relationship in tomorrow's medicine.     

What are the odds? How demographic similarity affects the prevalence of perceived employment discrimination.

Because research is needed to identify the conditions that facilitate or impede the prevalence of perceived workplace discrimination, the authors examined the effects of demographics and demographic similarity on the prevalence of sex- and race/ethnicity-based perceived workplace discrimination. Results from a national survey of 763 full-time, United States employees show perceived sex-based discrimination at work was more prevalent among female than male employees, and perceived race-based discrimination at work was more prevalent among Black and Hispanic than White employees. Additionally, perceived racial/ethnic discrimination was less prevalent among those with same-race/ethnicity supervisors. The effect of employee-coworker sex similarity on perceived sex discrimination was significant only for women, and the effects of supervisor-subordinate racial similarity on the prevalence of perceived racial discrimination varied between Black and White respondents, depending on employee-residential-community racial similarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What comes first? How selective attentional processes regulate the activation of a motor routine in a manual search task.

An intriguing error has been observed in toddlers presented with a 3-location search task involving invisible displacements of an object, namely, the C-not-B task. In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the dynamics of the attentional focus process that is suspected to be involved in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-old children were tested on a new adaptation of the C-not-B task in which the opening of the experimenter's hand between cloths provided visual information about the correct localization of the toy. Children still emitted a strong response bias toward the last hiding place. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-old children were tested on a new version of the task that was designed to investigate the role of the central location in the task. This 2nd experiment demonstrated that changing the hand's movement from A to C to B did not enable children to succeed in the task. In Experiment 3, 2.5-year-old children were tested in a situation that is analogous to the C-not-B with open hands task except for the fact that the experimenter dropped the toy under the 1st cloth in the path. Toddlers succeeded when the toy was hidden at Location A but not when it was hidden at Location B. Data indicate that attentional focus on the experimenter's hand motion is contingent on whether that stimulus is critical to performing the task. We argue that these findings provide a potential mechanism through which motor routines can be regulated in accordance with strategic intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge?

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 47(1) of Developmental Psychology (see record 2011-00627-019). A coding error resulted in incorrect item-level data being reported on the point-to-x task (not the children‘s overall performance on this task) in Table 2 and in the section of the Results headed Point-to-X Task Performance (second column, p. 1314). In the first paragraph in the section, the correct average score for knowledge of cardinal meanings of the number words. In the second paragraph in the section, there is an example illustrating children’s greater performance on items involving a target and a distractor that were one digit apart. An additional adjustment in the second paragraph involves the finding that children performed better when at least one of two choice sets was a small number (1–3) than when both choice sets were greater than or equal to 4. More information for the corrections and the corrected table are given in the erratum.] Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the number words (e.g., knowing that the word “four” refers to sets with 4 items) is predicted by the “number talk” they hear from their primary caregiver in the early home environment. Results from 5 visits showed substantial variation in parents' number talk to children between the ages of 14 and 30 months. Moreover, this variation predicted children's knowledge of the cardinal meanings of number words at 46 months, even when socioeconomic status and other measures of parent and child talk were controlled. These findings suggest that encouraging parents to talk about number with their toddlers, and providing them with effective ways to do so, may positively impact children's school achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is coded into memory in the absence of outcome feedback?

Although people often have to learn from environments with scarce and highly selective outcome feedback, the question of how nonfeedback trials are represented in memory and affect later performance has received little attention in models of learning and decision making. In this article, the authors use the generalized context model (Nosofsky, 1986) as a vehicle to test contrasting hypotheses about the coding of nonfeedback trials. Data across 3 experiments with selective decision-contingent and selective outcome-contingent feedback provide support for the hypothesis of constructivist coding (Elwin, Juslin, Olsson, & Enkvist, 2007), according to which the outcomes on nonfeedback trials are coded with the most likely outcome, as inferred by the individual. The relation to sampling-based approaches to judgment, and the adaptive significance of constructivist coding, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What are the symptoms of varicose veins? Edinburgh vein study cross sectional population survey

OBJECTIVE: To define the relations between age, sex, lower limb symptoms, and the presence of trunk varicose veins on clinical examination. DESIGN: Cross sectional population study. SETTING: 12 general practices with catchment areas geographically and socioeconomically distributed throughout Edinburgh. PARTICIPANTS: An age stratified random sample of 1566 people (699 men and 867 women) aged 18-64 selected from the computerised age-sex registers of participating practices. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Self administered questionnaire on the presence of lower limb symptoms and physical examination to determine the presence and severity of varicose veins. RESULTS: Women were significantly more likely than men to report lower limb symptoms such as heaviness or tension, swelling, aching, restless legs, cramps, and itching. The prevalence of symptoms tended to increase with age in both sexes. In men, only itching was significantly related to the presence and severity of trunk varices (linear test for trend, P=0.011). In women there was a significant relation between trunk varices and the symptoms of heaviness or tension (P相似文献   

What is the shelf life of a test? The effect of time on the psychometrics of a cognitive ability test battery.

The psychometric stability of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery was studied with data collected at 5 points over a 16-year period using item response theory (IRT) methods. Although 25 of the 200 items changed significantly over the years across 3 different gender-ethnic groups (i.e., White men, White women, and Black men), the overall characteristics of the tests were not severely affected by item-level changes. Items from tests that were more semantically laden were found to be more susceptible to the effects of time compared with those that focused on skills and principles. The findings are discussed in the context of the effects of time on the effectiveness of psychological measures. A call is made to test developers and test users to pay attention to the shelf life of their tests. The use of IRT methods for studying the effects of time on psychometrics is also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is the unit of visual attention? Object for selection, but Boolean map for access.

In the past 20 years, numerous theories and findings have suggested that the unit of visual attention is the object. In this study, I first clarify 2 different meanings of unit of visual attention, namely the unit of access in the sense of measurement and the unit of selection in the sense of division. In accordance with this distinction, I argue that an object, as commonly described, is only the unit of selection. The unit of access is better characterized as a Boolean map (Huang & Pashler, 2007), that is, the linkage of a single feature value per dimension associated with a map (i.e., a set of locations). The experiments in this study demonstrated the following: (a) Grouping items into a single object (by connecting them) does not improve the perception of these items (Experiment 1); (b) same-object advantage exists only when the features to be perceived are different dimensions of a single Boolean map and not when they belong to different parts of an object (Experiments 2 and 3); (c) cuing the relevant feature does not help perception when the features to be perceived are different dimensions of a single Boolean map but does help significantly when these features belong to different parts of an object (Experiment 4); and (d) connection, as used in Experiments 1–4, is effective in affecting object structure (i.e., affecting the mechanism of selection) in both an enumeration and a tracking task (Experiments 5 and 6). The results of these experiments, together with data available in the literature, demonstrate that the unit of access is a Boolean map, not an object. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What about the kids? Parenting and child adjustment in the context of couple therapy.

Little research examines parenting and children's adjustment when couples engage in therapy. We examined how couples with and without children improve with couple therapy and whether they also report improvements in parenting and child adjustment. With up to twenty six sessions of couple therapy, 134 couples, 68 of whom had children, showed improved marital satisfaction during treatment, which was ultimately maintained over the 2-year follow-up, regardless of whether they had children. Couples married relatively longer, both with and without children, evidenced greater improvement. Couples with children reported less conflict over child rearing and better child adjustment during treatment, but only improvements in the former were maintained. Conflict over child rearing mediated the relationship between marital distress and child adjustment over therapy and the 2-year follow-up. These preliminary results suggest that couples in therapy may decrease their conflict over child rearing during treatment and they may be able to maintain these gains for at least two years following treatment; moreover, over the course of treatment, this decreased conflict is tied to improved child adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Embedded words in visual word recognition: Does the left hemisphere see the rain in brain?

To examine whether interhemispheric transfer during foveal word recognition entails a discontinuity between the information presented to the left and right of fixation, we presented target words in such a way that participants fixated immediately left or right of an embedded word (as in gr*apple, bull*et) or in the middle of an embedded word (grapp*le, bu*llet). Categorization responses to target words were faster and more accurate in a congruent condition (in which the embedded word was associated with the same response; e.g., Does bullet refer to an item of clothing?) than in an incongruent condition (e.g., Does bullet refer to a type of animal?). However, the magnitude of this effect did not vary as a function of position of fixation, relative to the embedded word, as might be expected if information from the 2 visual fields was initially split over the cerebral hemispheres and integrated only late in the word identification process. Equivalent results were observed in Experiment 1 (long stimulus duration) and Experiment 2 (in which stimulus duration was 200 ms; i.e., less than the time required to initiate a refixation). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is responsible for the emergence of order and pattern in psychological systems?

Order and pattern abound in the natural world. However, whereas the emergence of order and pattern in physical or biological systems is typically explained by means of self-organization and field dynamics, the emergence of order and pattern in psychological systems is typically explained by means of mediating endogenous entities (such as representations or specialized brain areas) or mechanisms (such as motor or genetic programs). I review a self-organization and field-based approach to understanding order and patterns in a variety of physical and biological systems. I then provide a sketch of recent research that has applied such an approach to understanding order and pattern in psychological phenomena (including development, motor control, perception, cognition, and social behavior). Such an approach promises to reduce the explanatory burden associated with psychological phenomena and brings explanations of such phenomena into greater congruence with natural law. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Where are the generators?

Organizational creativity is presented as four distinctly different sequential stages of a dynamic cognitive creative problem solving process: generation, conceptualization, optimization, and implementation. The generation stage is the activity that initiates the creative process. It is disruptive, because it entails proactively and deliberately seeking and discovering brand new problems and opportunities. Often called opportunity finding, generation results from restless discontent with the status quo. This activity is different from the second stage, conceptualization, which other researchers have previously described as problem construction, identification, or formulation. Such second stage activity gives definition to a newly discovered problem freshly emerging from the first stage or to a presented or otherwise already existing problem. We provide research showing that the people who prefer the generation stage activity (generators) are underrepresented in industrial and business organizations and are likely to be found in occupations normally found outside such organizations, for example, artists, writers, designers, teachers, and academic institutions. We argue that organizations seeking increased creativity and innovation could do so by understanding and recognizing the contributions made by people preferring the generator style, and by making generator activity more attractive for all members of the organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is the psychiatrist's role in drugs and alcohol?

OBJECTIVE: This article describes a consensus view of the role of psychiatrists in respect of alcohol and other drug (AOD) problems, in response to the view expressed by Wodak [1]. METHOD: The data were selected on the basis of the knowledge and experience of the authors. RESULTS: Psychiatrists have made major contributions in the primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of AOD problems over many years in Australia and New Zealand. In recent years there has been an explosion of new knowledge in the AOD area and a shift from mental health to primary and public health care for these patients. Substance use disorders (SUD) are highly prevalent in all areas of psychiatric practice, requiring treatment in their own right as well as complicating the treatment of coexisting psychiatric illness. CONCLUSION: It is argued that psychiatrists have important roles in harm reduction, prevention and policy development; brief and early intervention in SUD in liaison and child psychiatry; and systematic treatment for those with dependence and other psychiatric comorbidity. A research and collaborative approach to AOD services and patients should be encouraged, rather than engaging in divisive debate over "ownership' of this area of clinical practice.