What attracts attention during police pursuit driving?

Efficient deployment of attention is important to the safe execution of tasks with a high content of visual information, such as driving. Chasing a lead vehicle is an extremely demanding and dangerous task, though little is known of the visual skills required. A study is reported that recorded the eye movements of police drivers and two control groups (novices and age‐ and experienced‐ matched controls) while watching a series of video clips of driving. The clips included pursuits, emergency response drives, and control drives (at normal speeds) around Nottinghamshire, UK. Analysis of gaze durations within certain categories of stimuli revealed that daytime pursuit drives correspond with an increase in gaze durations on a lead car (controlled for exposure), though police drivers direct their attention to other sources of potential hazards, such as pedestrians, more so than other drivers. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Borderline Personality Disorder and Deliberate Self‐Harm: Does Experiential Avoidance Play a Role?

The theory that borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with experiential avoidance, and that experiential avoidance mediates the association between BPD and deliberate, nonsuicidal self-harm was examined. Female inmate participants (N = 105) were given structured diagnostic assessments of BPD, as well as several measures of experiential avoidance. There was a high lifetime prevalence of past self-harm (47.6%). Higher dimensional scores representing BPD severity were associated with higher self-harm frequency and greater experiential avoidance. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that experiential avoidance did not mediate the association between BPD and self-harm, although thought suppression was associated with self-harm frequency.     

Anxiogenic Patterns in Mother-Child Interactions

ABSTRACT

The current study examined psychosocial variables associated with the development of anxiety in children. While previous literature has established parental affectionless control as an important contributor to the development of anxiety in children, few have examined this construct within the dynamic context of parent-child interaction. In the current study, the affect and behavior of anxious mothers and their children (ages 6 to 12 years) were examined during two mildly stressful tasks, with a total of 64 mother-child dyads participating in the study. Analyses supported the hypothesis that maternal affectionless control mediates the relationship between child anxiety and child disengagement/withdrawal from difficult tasks. Results are discussed in terms of implications for psychosocial mechanisms of the familial transmission of anxiety.     

A note on stability in force applied to control a repetitive task with the legs

The forces applied to pedals during cycling were collected every 40 ms from approximately 29,000 movement repetitions. Intra-cycle mean values of force and its variability were significantly correlated, supporting Schmidt's impulse variability theory of within-movement activities of the legs. In addition, as mean forces approached peak values, coefficients of variation decreased. From averages taken minute by minute, intra-cycle forces were seen to rise or fall in concert, implying that the pattern as a whole constituted a significant neuro-muscular unit of control.     

Intermediate Vision: Architecture,Implementation, and Use

This article describes an implemented architecture for intermediate vision. By integrating a variety of Intermediate visual mechanisms and putting them to use in support of concrete activity, the implementation demonstrates their utility. The sytem, SIVS, models psychophysical discoveries about visual attention and search. It is designed to be efficiently implementable in slow, massively parallel, locally connected hardware, such as that of the brain. SIVS addresses five fundamental problems. Visual attention is required to restrict processing to task-relevant locations in the image. Visual search finds such locations. Visual routines are a means for nonuniform processing based on task demands. Intermediate objects keep track of intermediate results of this processing. Visual operators are a set of relatively abstract, general-purpose primitives for spatial analysis, out of which visual routines are assembled.     

Arousal and the Bakan vigilance task: The effects of noise intensity and the presence of others

The joint effects of social setting and loud noise on task performance are examined. In a modified version of the Bakan vigilance task subjects were required to detect a sequence of two identical even digits and to report the two digits preceding the signal. Two types of acoustic environment were compared: loud noise at 90 dBC and quiet noise at 60 dBC. Two types of social setting were employed: “pair” where two subjects worked in the same room on similar tasks, and “single” where a subject performed the task alone. The effects of noise and the presence of another did not interact. Loud noise increased the speed of responses to signals early in the task. This effect is attributed to noise-induced arousal. There was a higher incidence of recall errors in pre-signal digits when subjects were in pairs. This effect is attributed to distraction. This research was part of a series of studies sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (Grant HR 5563 awarded to Dr. A.J. Chapman and Dr. D.M. Jones).     

Partial knowledge in a tip-of-the-tongue state about two- and three-word proper names

Participants in this study attempted to name 44 famous people in response to reading biographical information about them. Half of the celebrities had names that contained two words (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Penn), and half of them had names containing three words (e.g., Catherine Zeta Jones and Billy Bob Thornton). Half of the names had previously been judged to be of high familiarity (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow), and half were of lower familiarity (e.g., Billy Bob Thornton). The results showed that when in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, the participants were able to estimate at above-chance rates whether a celebrity’s name comprised two or three words. Accurate information about the number of words was not available to the participants unless they were in a TOT state or had already named the person. Attempts to identify celebrities whose name had three elements were associated with an increased number of TOTs, relative to celebrities whose name had two units, but there was no difference in the number of don’t know responses for names containing two or three words. Calculations based on Gollan and Brown (2006) suggested that having three names impaired the phonological but not the semantic stage of lexical retrieval, whereas low familiarity impaired both semantic and phonological retrieval stages.     

Replicability and 40-year predictive power of childhood ARC types

We examined 3 questions surrounding the undercontrolled, overcontrolled, and resilient-or Asendorpf-Robins-Caspi (ARC)-personality types originally identified by Block (1971). In analyses of the teacher personality assessments of over 2,000 children in 1st through 6th grade in 1959-1967 and follow-up data on general and cardiovascular health outcomes in over 1,100 adults recontacted 40 years later, we found bootstrapped internal replication clustering suggesting that Big Five scores were best characterized by a tripartite cluster structure corresponding to the ARC types. This cluster structure was fuzzy rather than discrete, indicating that ARC constructs are best represented as gradients of similarity to 3 prototype Big Five profiles; ARC types and degrees of ARC prototypicality showed associations with multiple health outcomes 40 years later. ARC constructs were more parsimonious but, depending on the outcome, comparable or slightly worse classifiers than the dimensional Big Five traits. Forty-year incident cases of heart disease could be correctly identified with 67% accuracy by childhood personality information alone and stroke incidence with over 70% accuracy. Findings support the theoretical validity of ARC constructs, their treatment as continua of prototypicality rather than discrete categories, and the need for further understanding the robust predictive power of childhood personality for midlife health.