Looking back at ‘looking back’: operationalising referential gaze for dingoes in an unsolvable task

This paper examined the performance of dingoes (Canis dingo) on the rope-pulling task, previously used by Miklósi et al. (Curr Biol 13:763–766, 2003) to highlight a key distinction in the problem-solving behaviour of wolves compared to dogs when in the company of humans. That is, when dogs were confronted with an unsolvable task, following a solvable version of the task they looked back or gazed at the human, whereas, wolves did not. We replicated the rope-pulling task using 12 sanctuary-housed dingoes and used the Miklósi et al. (Curr Biol 13:763–766, 2003) definition of looking back behaviour to analyse the data. However, at least three different types of look backs were observed in our study. We, then developed a more accurate operational definition of looking back behaviour that was task specific and reanalysed the data. We found that the operational definition employed greatly influences the results, with vague definitions potentially overestimating the prevalence of looking back behaviour. Thus, caution must be taken when interpreting the results of studies utilising looking back as behaviour linked to assistance seeking during problem solving. We present a more stringent definition and make suggestions for future research.     

The age prospective memory paradox: young adults may not give their best outside of the lab

Previous research has identified the age prospective memory paradox of age-related declines in laboratory settings in contrast to age benefits in naturalistic settings. Various factors are assumed to account for this paradox, yet empirical evidence on this issue is scarce. In 2 experiments, the present study examined the effect of task setting in a laboratory task and the effect of motivation in a naturalistic task on prospective memory performance in young and older adults. For the laboratory task (Experiment 1, n = 40), we used a board game to simulate a week of daily activities and varied features of the prospective memory task (e.g., task regularity). For the naturalistic task (Experiment 2, n = 80), we instructed participants to try to remember to contact the experimenter repeatedly over the course of 1 week. Results from the laboratory prospective memory tasks indicated significant age-related decline for irregular tasks (p = .006) but not for regular and focal tasks. In addition, in the naturalistic task, the age benefit was eliminated when young adults were motivated by incentives (F < 1). In conclusion, the present results indicate that the variability of age differences in laboratory prospective memory tasks may be due in part to differences in the features of the prospective memory task. Furthermore, increases in motivation to perform the prospective task seem to help remedy prospective memory deficits in young adults in the naturalistic setting.     

Minimal use of working memory in a scene comparison task

Eye movement behaviour in hand-eye tasks suggests a preference for a “just in time” processing strategy that minimizes the use of working memory. In the present study, a scene comparison task was introduced to determine whether the preference holds when the task is primarily visual and when more complex naturalistic scenes are used as stimuli. In two experiments, participants made same or different judgements in response to simultaneously presented pairs of scenes that were identical or differed by one object. The number of fixations per scene glance and the number of fixations intervening between glances to corresponding objects suggest that frequently one object at a time is encoded and maintained in visual working memory. The same pattern of results was observed in a third experiment using word and object arrays. Overall, the results suggest a strong general bias toward minimal use of visual working memory in complex visual tasks.     

Prospective memory and ageing paradox with event-based tasks: A study of young,young-old,and old-old participants

Research on ageing and prospective memory—remembering to do something in the future—has resulted in paradoxical findings, whereby older adults are often impaired in the laboratory but perform significantly better than younger adults in naturalistic settings. Nevertheless, there are very few studies that have examined prospective memory both in and outside the laboratory using the same sample of young and old participants. Moreover, most naturalistic studies have used time-based tasks, and it is unclear whether the prospective memory and ageing paradox extends to event-based tasks. In this study, 72 young (18–30 years), 79 young-old (61–70 years), and 72 old-old (71–80 years) participants completed several event-based tasks in and outside the laboratory. Results showed that the ageing paradox does exist for event-based tasks but manifests itself differently from that in time-based tasks. Thus, younger adults outperformed old-old participants in two laboratory event-based tasks, but there were no age effects for a naturalistic task completed at home (remembering to write the date and time in the upper left corner of a questionnaire). The young and old-old also did not differ in remembering to retrieve a wristwatch from a pocket at the end of the laboratory session. This indicates that the paradox may be due to differences in ongoing task demands in the lab and everyday life, rather than the location per se. The findings call for a concentrated effort towards a theory of cognitive ageing that identifies the variables that do, or do not, account for this paradox.     

Identifying the main factors contributing to driving errors and traffic violations – Results from naturalistic driving data

Researchers have identified various factors that likely affect aberrant driving behaviors and therefore crash risk. However, it remains unclear which of these factors poses the greatest risk for either errors or violations under naturalistic driving conditions. This study investigated important variables contributing to driving errors and traffic violations based on naturalistic driving data from the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2). In addition, this study identified factors determining the drivers’ willingness to perform common secondary tasks while driving, which have been associated with different degrees of crash risk. Results showed that anger, passenger presence, and persistent individual differences in driver behavior were the main factors associated with committed violations; surprise, high-risk visually distracting secondary tasks, and the driving task demand passing through an interchange were the main factors associated with errors. The willingness to engage in risky secondary tasks while driving appeared to be related to an overall tendency to engage in risky driving behaviors. However, drivers considered the driving context particularly when engaging in visually distracting secondary tasks. This study’s comprehensive approach should be a step towards generating a complete model of the variables that contribute to, or mitigate dangers in traffic.     

Learning from experience in nonlinear environments: Evidence from a competition scenario

We test people’s ability to learn to estimate a criterion (probability of success in a competition scenario) that requires aggregating information in a nonlinear manner. The learning environments faced by experimental participants are kind in that they are characterized by immediate, accurate feedback involving either naturalistic outcomes (information on winning and/or ranking) or the normatively correct probabilities. We find no evidence of learning from the former and modest learning from the latter, except that a group of participants endowed with a memory aid performed substantially better. However, when the task is restructured such that information should be aggregated in a linear fashion, participants learn to make more accurate assessments. Our experiments highlight the important role played by prior beliefs in learning tasks, the default status of linear aggregation in many inferential judgments, and the difficulty of learning in nonlinear environments even in the presence of veridical feedback.     

Task prioritisation in multitasking during driving: opportunity to abort a concurrent task does not insulate braking responses from dual‐task slowing

In typical dual‐task driving studies, participants concurrently perform pairs of driving‐related and ‐unrelated tasks (e.g. vehicle braking and mental arithmetic). Requiring responses to both may implicitly equate their importance. In real‐life driving, however, the potential for collision dictates that a concurrent task should be assigned far lower priority than driving. To better reflect naturalistic driving conditions, we not only instructed participants to assign maximum priority to braking in a simulated driving task, but also encouraged them to ignore the concurrent task altogether on dual‐task trials. Despite these instructions, responses to the concurrent task often preceded braking, which suffered from dual‐task interference. We also found that redundant signals to the lead vehicle's brake lights resulted in faster braking responses and an increased likelihood that the braking response would occur first. The results are consistent with the Central Bottleneck (CB) model of dual‐task interference and may help guide the design of driver‐assistance systems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dissociable behavioural outcomes of visual statistical learning

ABSTRACT

Statistical learning refers to the extraction of probabilistic relationships between stimuli and is increasingly used as a method to understand learning processes. However, numerous cognitive processes are sensitive to the statistical relationships between stimuli and any one measure of learning may conflate these processes; to date little research has focused on differentiating these processes. To understand how multiple processes underlie statistical learning, here we compared, within the same study, operational measures of learning from different tasks that may be differentially sensitive to these processes. In Experiment 1, participants were visually exposed to temporal regularities embedded in a stream of shapes. Their task was to periodically detect whether a shape, whose contrast was staircased to a threshold level, was present or absent. Afterwards, they completed a search task, where statistically predictable shapes were found more quickly. We used the search task to label shape pairs as “learned” or “non-learned”, and then used these labels to analyse the detection task. We found a dissociation between learning on the search task and the detection task where only non-learned pairs showed learning effects in the detection task. This finding was replicated in further experiments with recognition memory (Experiment 2) and associative learning tasks (Experiment 3). Taken together, these findings are consistent with the view that statistical learning may comprise a family of processes that can produce dissociable effects on different aspects of behaviour.     

Effects of differential reinforcement and task difficulty on preschoolers' compliance with teacher instructions

Preschool children in day schools were given instructions to complete certain tasks. Four tasks were given of two types and two levels of difficulty. In each condition compliance with at most one instruction (one task) was reinforced. In two similar experiments, with six children, general results were: compliance with easy tasks was maintained without reinforcement when any task compliance was reinforced; compliance for hard tasks remained high only when that specific task was reinforced. Thus, generalization of compliance with instructions varied with task difficulty. The setting and procedure for both studies were designed to reduce possible coercive features of laboratory studies of generalized performance. Results show generalized performance can occur under naturalistic conditions. The effect of effort, as a response characteristic affecting generalized performance, is discussed.     

Illusory Personal Control as a Determinant of Bet Size and Type in Casino Craps Games1

Langer's (1974, 1975) theory regarding the conditions under which subjects performing a chance task will suffer from an illusion of control over the outcome has specified 6 conditions proposed to enhance the illusion ofcontrol in chance tasks. A number of studies have applied her theory and predictions to gambling, a real‐world arena of chance tasks where participants have been observed to act as if the outcomes are controllable by the use of various “logical” (acting on the “gambler's fallacy”) and superstitious strategies (e. g., blowing on dice). Thus far, however, these studies have not been conducted in naturalistic gaming environments and have yielded mixed results regarding the operation of the illusion of control. The present research offers the first study of the operation of the illusion of control in such a real‐world context. In order to examine the effects of active vs. passive task participation (a variable hypothesized by Langer to affect the illusion of control), patrons of Reno casinos were observed placing craps bets on their own and another yoked patron's dice rolls. It was hypothesized that subjects would (a) place higher bets and (b) place more “difficult” bets (e. g., where only one specific number, as opposed to any of several numbers, may win) on their own rolls (when they would experience the illusion of control over the outcome) than on other patrons' roles (when they would not experience such an illusion). That is, players were expected to generally adopt riskier betting strategies when throwing the dice. Results supported the hypotheses.     

What factors influence prospective memory for elderly people in a naturalistic setting?1

Previous studies comparing prospective memory between the elderly and young adults have shown that elderly adults perform better in naturalistic settings, while young adults perform better in laboratory settings. The purpose of this study was to examine what factors influence prospective memory in naturalistic settings, and we specifically focused on age, the complexity of the prospective memory task, self‐evaluation and knowledge of memory function, retrospective memory, external memory aids, and internal memory strategies as potential influential factors. Eighty‐six healthy, elderly participants were enrolled (44 women and 42 men, mean age = 68.56 years, SD = 4.53). The results showed that the use of external memory aids increased in complex prospective memory tasks that depended on output monitoring, while other factors did not influence prospective memory performance. These results suggest that elderly adults can perform tasks adequately by using external memory aids that compensate for age‐related memory declines in naturalistic settings.     

Optimization of postural control in precise gaze shifts and laser pointing

Young adults are known to reduce their postural sway to perform precise visual search and laser pointing tasks. We tested if young adults could reduce even more postural and/or center of pressure sway to succeed in both tasks simultaneously. The methodology is novel because published pointing tasks usually require continuously looking at the pointed target and not exploring an image while pointing elsewhere at the same time. Twenty-five healthy young adults (23.2 ± 2.5 years) performed six visual tasks. In the free-viewing task, participants randomly explored images with no goal. In two visual search tasks, participants searched to locate objects (easy search task) or graphical details (hard search task). Participants additionally pointed a laser beam into a central circle (2°) or pointed the laser turned off. Postural sway and center of pressure sway were reduced complementarily – in various variables – to perform the visual search and pointing tasks. Unexpectedly, the pointing task influenced more strongly postural sway and center of pressure sway than the search tasks. Overall, the participants adopted a functional strategy in stabilizing their posture to succeed in the pointing task and also to fully explore images. Therefore, it is possible to inverse the strength of effects found in the literature (usually stronger for the search task) in modulating the experimental methodology. In search tasks more than in free-viewing tasks, participants mostly rotated their eyes and head, and not their full body, to stabilize their posture. These results could have implications for shooting activities, video console games and rehabilitation most particularly.     

Is the fluency of language outputs related to individual differences in intelligence and executive function?

There has been little research on the fluency of language production and individual difference variables, such as intelligence and executive function. In this study, we report data from 106 participants who completed a battery of standardized cognitive tasks and a sentence production task. For the sentence production task, participants were presented with two objects and a verb and their task was to formulate a sentence. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses (e.g. uh, um), unfilled pauses, repetitions, and repairs. Repetitions occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then repeats the previous word/phrase, and repairs occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then starts over with a different word/phrase. Hierarchical structural equation modeling revealed a significant relationship between repair disfluencies and inhibition. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their role in models and theories of language production.     

Lexical access,story re-telling and sequencing skills in adults who clutter and those who do not

Cluttering is a rate-based disorder of fluency, the scope of whose diagnostic criteria currently remains unclear. This paper reports preliminary findings from a larger study which aims to determine whether cluttering can be associated with language disturbances as well as motor and rate based ones. Subtests from the Mt Wilga High Level Language Test (MWHLLT) were used to determine whether people who clutter (PWC) have word finding difficulties, and use significantly more maze behaviours compared to controls, during story re-telling and simple sequencing tasks. Independent t tests showed that PWC were significantly slower than control participants in lexical access and sentence completion tasks, but returned mixed findings when PWCs were required to name items within a semantic category. PWC produced significantly more maze behaviour than controls in a task where participants were required to explain how to undertake commonly performed actions, but no difference in use of maze behaviour was found between the two groups when retelling a story from memory. The implications of these findings are discussed.Educational objectives: (a) To identify issues surrounding the difficulties in diagnosing cluttering, (b) to identify and describe previous accounts of a language component in cluttering, (c) to describe how difficulties with lexical access and maze behaviour might be associated with cluttering, (d) to describe how data from the current research inform our present understanding of theories on cluttering.     

The role of feedback in shaping responses to risky road scenarios: Evidence from electrodermal activity

When faced with hazardous driving situations, rapid and effective risk perception and decision-making processes are of crucial importance for avoiding crashes. In these cases, the processes are accompanied and influenced by underlying psychophysiological mechanisms such as electrodermal activity (EDA) modulations. The present work aims to assess the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying participants’ risk perception and decision-making when facing risky road scenarios, as correlated to the feedback role in modulating participants’ behavior. Study 1 (n = 32) explores the behavioral effects of administering a contingent feedback in a decision (decision-making) and an evaluation (risk perception) task in response to a set of risky and not risky images. The behavioral data reveal an effect on the participants’ probability of response, independently from the type of image presented, when the feedback was administered. In the decision task, the effect is accompanied by a change in the amplitude and percentage of the skin conductance responses (SCRs), which are moderated by block of trials. Study 2 (n = 44) better assesses the role of task and block on participants’ physiological activation, as measured by EDA signal. The results show an increase in psychophysiological activation when the feedback is delivered, in the first part of the tasks, both in terms of SCRs amplitude and percentage to the presented road scenarios, followed by a decrease in the second part of the tasks. Moreover, this effect is more evident in the decision task than the evaluation task. These findings suggest that the role exerted by feedback when facing risky traffic images may be described as based on an associative process that, once the correct response has been learned, tends to be reduced as it becomes automatic. Overall, the results of the two studies represent an important step toward the development of training programs aimed at promoting safer behaviors in risky driving contexts.     

The effects of aging on remembering intentions: performance on a simulated shopping task

Three studies are described in which age differences on a task measuring memory for delayed intentions using naturalistic stimuli were examined. A simulated street scene was constructed from a network of photographs and sounds that participants could move through using a touch screen while completing a series of event‐based shopping errand instructions. The objective of the research was to identify the cognitive processes involved in the task that were vulnerable to the effects of ageing. Memory search but not cue detection was specifically affected in older persons when participants were given fewer trials to learn the instructions. There was no age specific effect on cue detection or memory search in either an unfamiliar street or one with increased levels of irrelevant visual and auditory noise. Cue detection but not memory search was disproportionately affected in older persons after filled interruptions, suggesting that the capacity for self‐initiated reinstatement of working memory is reduced in old age. In general, using a computer‐based simulation of a real‐life task was found to be a practical means of examining the effects on behaviour and cognition of task parameters that are significant in assessing everyday memory abilities. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of task requirements on priming in object decision and matching

We argue that task requirements can be the determinant in generating different results in studies on visual object recognition. We investigated priming for novel visual objects in three implicit memory tasks. A study-test design was employed in which participants first viewed line drawings of unfamiliar objects and later made different decisions about structural aspects of the objects. Priming for both symmetric and asymmetric possible objects was observed in a task requiring a judgment of structural possibility. However, when the task was changed to one requiring a judgment of structural symmetry, only symmetric possible objects showed priming. Finally, in a matching task in which participants made a same-different judgment, only symmetric possible objects exhibited priming. These results suggest that an understanding of object representation will be most fruitful if it is based on careful analyses of both the task demands and their interaction(s) with encoding and retrieval processes.     

Job demands,job resources and innovative work behaviour: a European Union study

This study aims to investigate the relationship between several job design variables and innovative work behaviour (IWB). Guided by the Job Demands Resources model, the aim was to evaluate the relationship between work demands (time constraints), resources (autonomy and social support), and other work factors (task monotony, complexity, and dealing with unforeseen circumstances) with idea generation and idea implementation behaviours in a sample of 12,924 participants from the 27 European Union member states in 2010. We also wished to investigate if individual IWB, at the country level, is associated with country innovative performance (an aggregate of process/product and marketing/organizational innovation). We employed a multilevel generalized structural equation model to test our hypotheses. In our final model autonomy, manager encouragement and dealing with unforeseen problems showed the highest positive relationship with idea generation and idea implementation. Conversely, monotonous tasks and working at high speed were negatively related to IWB. Furthermore, we have found strong indications that country-level IWB positively relates to the odds of a country scoring higher on the aforementioned innovation indicators. Between-country unexplained variance in IWB was reduced from 17.1% in our initial model, to 1.9% in our final iteration. Limitations, implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Do elderly couples have a better prospective memory than other elderly people when they collaborate?

A naturalistic study investigated how memory tasks affected group productivity for two individuals working in three kinds of group constellations: old married couples, old non‐friend pairs, and nominal groups of two individuals working on their own. The retrospective memory task was to recall episodic information given on a visit to a university campus. The prospective memory task was to remind the participants of actions to be performed during the visit. The prospective memory tasks were event‐based or time‐based. The delay or retention interval was also manipulated. In addition, an interview on how the elderly handled remembering during daily life was included. The results suggest that: (1) dyads suffered from collaboration relative to the predicted potential, replicating earlier research; old married couples did not reduce the same productivity loss as clearly as friends did in former studies; the couples who claimed that they used a transactive memory system, however, achieved the same productivity as the nominal pairs (i.e. the predicted potential; (2) the task effects produced unexpected results, some of which could be accounted for by the naturalistic setting used. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

自我损耗的研究方法述评

自我控制是个体成功的重要因素,但个体在自我控制的同时,也要为每次控制付出代价,产生自我损耗,导致随后自我控制的失败。本文回顾了双任务范式中诱发、测量、克服自我损耗的方法,认为未来研究应探索任务的有效性、多采用三任务范式等,在克服自我损耗方面,应同时关注短期克服损耗的方法和提高整体控制能力的方法。