The effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception

Research has increasingly focussed on the benefits of meditation in everyday life and performance. Mindfulness in particular improves attention, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. Using a within-subjects design, participants carried out a temporal bisection task, where several probe durations are compared to “short” and “long” standards. Following this, participants either listened to an audiobook or a meditation that focussed on the movement of breath in the body. Finally, participants completed the temporal bisection task for a second time. The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations. This meditative effect has wider implications for the use of mindfulness as an everyday practice and a basis for clinical treatment.     

Effects of Event Probability and Animateness on Children's Comprehension of Active and Passive Sentences

Thirty-six three-, four-, and five-year-old boys and girls were asked to act out, with appropriate toys, 48 sentences presented with instructions to make the toys do what E said. Sentences were designed to test the effects on comprehension of (a) event probability, (b) sentence voice, and (c) subject/object animateness. Sentences with either an animate subject and object, or an inanimate subject and object, were considered to be reversible; however, not all reversible sentences were symmetrical with respect to event probability. All main effects were significant, and performance improved with age. The significant interactions indicated that there is a difference between animateness and inanimateness in reversible sentences. The data also suggested that (a) animateness may be an important variable in children's early comprehension of speech, and (b) the traditional definition of reversibility should be modified to unconfound the effects of event probability and animateness.     

The ideological construction of crime: An analysis of the L.E.A.A. career criminal program

This paper examines the development of the LEAA Career Criminal Program and analyzes the ideological consequences of the construction of the legal category “career criminal.” It is argued that the creation of this program illustrates how the criminal justice process contributes to the existence of ideological hegemony and societal reproduction. No one at LEAA, however, ‘deliberately set out to create a program which would serve these ideological functions. The evidence shows that career advancement, professional goals, fortuitous circumstances, and political interests were the factors that lay behind the development of this particular program. Yet the program did have ideological consequences. There was a complex chain of subtle and often unreflected upon inducements, rewards, and incentives which made it likely that the program would be shaped in accordance with the interests of the dominant class.     

The Behavioral Dyscontrol Scale and Functional Status Among Elderly Medical and Surgical Rehabilitation Patients

This research was conducted in a sample of 150 older adults (mean age = 78.0) who were inpatients receiving rehabilitation services for a variety of medical and postsurgical conditions. The purpose of the study was to test the hypothesis that the Behavioral Dyscontrol Scale (BDS), a measure of the ability to use intentions to guide purposeful activity, would be strongly associated with concurrent functional status after controlling for age, sex, education, severity of pain, medical comorbidity, depression (Geriatric Depression Scale), and general mental status (Mini Mental State Exam [MMSE]). Functional status was assessed by rehabilitaion nurses' ratings of patients on 11 individual Activities of Daily Living (ADL) items and the Barthel Index. The hypothesis, tested by means of multiple regression analysis, was supported by the results. The BDS was the independent variable most strongly associated with all 11 ADL items and the Barthel Index. The MMSE contributed significantly to none of the models. Other covariates made minimal contributions to the variance shared with functional ability. Consistent with prior results in other samples, the ability to use intentions to guide purposeful behavior appears to be an important contributor to everyday functioning among older adults.     

Visual search for real world targets under conditions of high target-background similarity: Exploring training and transfer in younger and older adults

Real world visual search tasks often require observers to locate a target that blends in with its surrounding environment. However, studies of the effect of target-background similarity on search processes have been relatively rare and have ignored potential age-related differences. We trained younger and older adults to search displays comprised of real world objects on either homogenous backgrounds or backgrounds that camouflaged the target. Training was followed by a transfer session in which participants searched for novel camouflaged objects. Although older adults were slower to locate the target compared to younger adults, all participants improved substantially with training. Surprisingly, camouflage-trained younger and older adults showed no performance decrements when transferred to novel camouflage displays, suggesting that observers learned age-invariant, generalizable skills relevant for searching under conditions of high target-background similarity. Camouflage training benefits at transfer for older adults appeared to be related to improvements in attentional guidance and target recognition rather than a more efficient search strategy.     

InterFace: A software package for face image warping,averaging, and principal components analysis

We describe InterFace, a software package for research in face recognition. The package supports image warping, reshaping, averaging of multiple face images, and morphing between faces. It also supports principal components analysis (PCA) of face images, along with tools for exploring the “face space” produced by PCA. The package uses a simple graphical user interface, allowing users to perform these sophisticated image manipulations without any need for programming knowledge. The program is available for download in the form of an app, which requires that users also have access to the (freely available) MATLAB Runtime environment.     

Driving impairs talking

It is well known that conversation (e.g, on a cell phone) impairs driving. We demonstrate that the reverse is also true: Language production and comprehension, and the encoding of the products of comprehension into memory, are less accurate when one is driving. Ninety-six pairs of drivers and conversation partners engaged in a story-retelling task in a driving simulator. Half of the pairs were older adults. Each pair completed one dual-task block (driving during the retelling task) and two single-task control blocks. The results showed a decline in the accuracy of the drivers’ storytelling and of their memory for stories that were told to them by their nondriving partners. Speech production suffered an additional cost when the difficulty of driving increased. Measures of driving performance suggested that the drivers gave priority to the driving task when they were conversing. As a result, their linguistic performance suffered.     

Training older adults to search more effectively: scanning strategy and visual search in dynamic displays

The authors examined the ability of older adults to modify their search strategies to detect changes in dynamic displays. Older adults who made few eye movements during search (i.e., covert searchers) were faster and more accurate compared with individuals who made many eye movements (i.e., overt searchers). When overt searchers were instructed to adopt a covert search strategy, target detection performance increased to the level of natural covert searchers. Similarly, covert searchers instructed to search overtly exhibited a decrease in target detection performance. These data suggest that with instructions and minimal practice, older adults can ameliorate the cost of a poor search strategy.