Morningness-eveningness and health-related quality of life among adolescents

Accumulating evidence suggests that evening-type adolescents are exposed to a number of determinants that might have a negative impact on their health condition. Given that few studies have investigated the association between chronotype and quality of life measures in large samples of adolescents, the aim of this study was to assess the relationship between morningness-eveningness and health-related quality of life among 1600 adolescents (aged 12-16 years). Adolescents completed the Ve?u et Santé Per?ue de L'adolescent (VSP-A) and the Morningness-Eveningness Scale for Children (MESC). Girls and older adolescents reported worse health indicators and were more evening oriented. Evening-type adolescents obtained lower scores on vitality, physical and psychological well-being, body image, relations with parents, relations with teachers, school work and global health scale.     

Age, training, and previous experience predict race performance in long-distance inline skaters, not anthropometry

The association of characteristics of anthropometry, training, and previous experience with race time in 84 recreational, long-distance, inline skaters at the longest inline marathon in Europe (111 km), the Inline One-eleven in Switzerland, was investigated to identify predictor variables for performance. Age, duration per training unit, and personal best time were the only three variables related to race time in a multiple regression, while none of the 16 anthropometric variables were related. Anthropometric characteristics seem to be of no importance for a fast race time in a long-distance inline skating race in contrast to training volume and previous experience, when controlled with covariates. Improving performance in a long-distance inline skating race might be related to a high training volume and previous race experience. Also, doing such a race requires a parallel psychological effort, mental stamina, focus, and persistence. This may be reflected in the preparation and training for the event. Future studies should investigate what motivates these athletes to train and compete.     

On the measurement of criterion noise in signal detection theory: the case of recognition memory

Traditional approaches within the framework of signal detection theory (SDT; Green & Swets, 1966), especially in the field of recognition memory, assume that the positioning of response criteria is not a noisy process. Recent work (Benjamin, Diaz, & Wee, 2009; Mueller & Weidemann, 2008) has challenged this assumption, arguing not only for the existence of criterion noise but also for its large magnitude and substantive contribution to individuals' performance. A review of these recent approaches for the measurement of criterion noise in SDT identifies several shortcomings and confoundings. A reanalysis of Benjamin et al.'s (2009) data sets as well as the results from a new experimental method indicate that the different forms of criterion noise proposed in the recognition memory literature are of very low magnitudes, and they do not provide a significant improvement over the account already given by traditional SDT without criterion noise.     

The learning of visually guided action: An information-space analysis of pole balancing

In cart-pole balancing, one moves a cart in 1 dimension so as to balance an attached inverted pendulum. We approached perception-action and learning in this task from an ecological perspective. This entailed identifying a space of informational variables that balancers use as they perform the task and demonstrating that they improve by traversing the space to the loci of more useful variables. We presented a novel information space-including fractional derivatives of pendulum angle (e.g., halfway between angle and angular velocity)-as possible information for balancing. Fourteen college students tried to meet a criterion of balancing the pole for 30 s on 3 of 5 successive trials, up to a maximum of 150 attempts. Loci in the fractional derivative space predicted the time series of force production well. Systematic differences were seen in loci as a function of success, and systematic changes in locus were seen with learning. The fractional derivatives were shown to predict pole angles a short time interval into the future, allowing balancers to prospectively control the action and thereby nullify visuomotor delay. In addition to loci in the information space, we analyzed loci in a calibration space, reflecting the gain relating force to information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Do ‘Contextualist Cases’ Support Contextualism?

This paper addresses the argument from ‘contextualist cases’—such as for instance DeRose’s Bank cases—to attributor contextualism. It is argued that these cases do not make a decisive case against invariantism and that the debate between contextualists and invariantists will have to be settled on broader theoretical grounds.     

Dissociable stages of problem solving (II): first evidence for process-contingent temporal order of activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

In a companion study, eye-movement analyses in the Tower of London task (TOL) revealed independent indicators of functionally separable cognitive processes during problem solving, with processes of building up an internal representation of the problem preceding actual planning processes. These results imply that processes of internalization and planning should also be distinguishable in time and space with respect to concomitant brain activation patterns. To investigate this possibility, here we conducted analyses of fMRI data for left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) during problem solving in the TOL task by accounting for the trial-by-trial variability of onsets and durations of the different cognitive processing stages. Comparisons between stimulus-locked and response-locked modeling approaches affirmed that activation in left dlPFC was elicited particularly during early processes of internalization, comprising the extraction of goal information and the generation of an internal problem representation, whereas activation in right dlPFC was predominantly attributable to later processes of mental transformations on this representation, that is planning proper. Thus, present data corroborate the proposal that often observed bilateral dlPFC activation patterns during complex cognitive tasks such as problem solving may reflect functionally and, to some extent, even temporally separable processes with opposing lateralizations.     

Dissociable stages of problem solving (I): temporal characteristics revealed by eye-movement analyses

Understanding the functional neuroanatomy of planning and problem solving may substantially benefit from better insight into the chronology of the cognitive processes involved. Based on the assumption that regularities in cognitive processing are reflected in overtly observable eye-movement patterns, here we recorded eye movements while participants worked on Tower of London (TOL) problems that comprised an experimental manipulation of different task demands. Single-trial saccade-locked analyses revealed that higher demands on forming an internal problem representation were associated with an increased number of gaze alternations between start state and goal state, but did not show any effect on the durations of these inspections of the states. In contrast, higher demands on actual planning in terms of mental manipulations of working memory contents coincided with a prolonged duration of the very last inspection of the start state (i.e., immediately preceding movement execution) but did not show any effect on the number of gaze alterations. Differential task demands on internalization and planning processes during problem solving hence selectively affect different eye-movement parameters. Moreover, these findings complement previous neuroimaging data on dissociable contributions of left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in problem solving with novel evidence for a corresponding dissociation in the eye-movement patterns reflecting the associated cognitive processes.     

Gaze behaviour during space perception and spatial decision making

A series of four experiments investigating gaze behavior and decision making in the context of wayfinding is reported. Participants were presented with screenshots of choice points taken in large virtual environments. Each screenshot depicted alternative path options. In Experiment 1, participants had to decide between them to find an object hidden in the environment. In Experiment 2, participants were first informed about which path option to take as if following a guided route. Subsequently, they were presented with the same images in random order and had to indicate which path option they chose during initial exposure. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate (1) that participants have a tendency to choose the path option that featured the longer line of sight, and (2) a robust gaze bias towards the eventually chosen path option. In Experiment 2, systematic differences in gaze behavior towards the alternative path options between encoding and decoding were observed. Based on data from Experiments 1 and 2 and two control experiments ensuring that fixation patterns were specific to the spatial tasks, we develop a tentative model of gaze behavior during wayfinding decision making suggesting that particular attention was paid to image areas depicting changes in the local geometry of the environments such as corners, openings, and occlusions. Together, the results suggest that gaze during a wayfinding tasks is directed toward, and can be predicted by, a subset of environmental features and that gaze bias effects are a general phenomenon of visual decision making.     

A rational analysis of the acquisition of multisensory representations

How do people learn multisensory, or amodal, representations, and what consequences do these representations have for perceptual performance? We address this question by performing a rational analysis of the problem of learning multisensory representations. This analysis makes use of a Bayesian nonparametric model that acquires latent multisensory features that optimally explain the unisensory features arising in individual sensory modalities. The model qualitatively accounts for several important aspects of multisensory perception: (a) it integrates information from multiple sensory sources in such a way that it leads to superior performances in, for example, categorization tasks; (b) its performances suggest that multisensory training leads to better learning than unisensory training, even when testing is conducted in unisensory conditions; (c) its multisensory representations are modality invariant; and (d) it predicts ‘‘missing” sensory representations in modalities when the input to those modalities is absent. Our rational analysis indicates that all of these aspects emerge as part of the optimal solution to the problem of learning to represent complex multisensory environments.     

Age and gender differences in morningness-eveningness during adolescence

Morningness-eveningness was assessed in a large sample of adolescents and young adults. Morningness decreased from 12 to 15 years, and then remained on a stable level until about 20 years, when a turn back to morningness occurred. Boys and men were on average more evening-oriented than were girls and women. In detail, significant differences existed at the ages of 16, 18, and 19 years. A quadratic function explained more variance than a linear regression. Composite Scale of Morningness scores are related to puberty scores in boys and girls, and when combining data (i.e., higher pubertal development was related to eveningness).