Physician Communication Coaching: How Psychologists can Elevate Skills and Support Resident Education,Professionalism, and Well-being

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - Many factors influence resident physician communication, including rigorous training demands that can contribute to professionalism issues or...     

The Contribution of Executive Function to Source Memory Development in Early Childhood

Age-related differences in episodic memory judgments assessing recall of fact information and the source of this information were examined. The role of executive function (EF) in supporting early episodic memory ability was also explored. Four- and 6-year-old children were taught 10 novel facts from two different sources (experimenter or puppet), and memory for both fact and source information was later tested. Measures of working memory, inhibitory control, and set shifting were obtained to produce an indicator of children's EF. Six-year-olds recalled more fact and source information than did 4-year-olds. Regression analyses revealed that age, language ability, and EF accounted for unique variance in children's fact recall and source recall performance. These findings suggest a link between episodic memory and EF, and we propose that developmental investigations should further explore this association.     

The role of habituation and attentional orienting in the disruption of short-term memory performance

A series of experiments explored habituation and dishabituation to repeated auditory distractors. Participants memorised lists of visually presented items in silence or while ignoring continuously presented auditory distractors. No habituation could be observed, in that the size of the auditory distractor effect did not decrease during the experiment. However, there was evidence for attentional orienting when novel auditory material was presented after a long period of repetitive stimulation, in that a change of distractors was associated with a temporary decrease in recall performance. The results are most consistent with theoretical accounts that claim that the auditory distractor effect is caused primarily by automatic interference, but that still allow attention to play a limited role in the short-term maintenance of information.     

Minimally-effective interpolated stimuli in weight discrimination

The question of minimally effective weights was investigated by using an interpolated anchor paradigm. The weight series of 100 to 300 g,at 50-g-step intervals, was shown to be significantly affected by an interpolated anchor of 0.5 g, thus demonstrating a reduction in the region of ineffectiveness. The results were discussed in terms of procedural artifacts in the weight-judging methods reported in previous literature.