A latent trait analysis of the eysenck personality questionnaire in an elderly community sample

A latent trait model was fitted to the responses of a large probability sample of elderly Australians to the Extraversion and Neuroticism scales of the short form of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire—Revised (EPQ-R). Item parameters obtained were compared to those available from comparable analyses of a younger sample in order to detect item bias. While some evidence of differential functioning between younger and older groups was found, the measurement properties of these scales in older persons were confirmed. The comparable functioning of the instrument in both groups that scores on these scales may be validly compared across the adult life span.     

Object identification in context: the visual processing of natural scenes.

When we view a natural visual scene, we seem able to determine effortlessly the scene's semantic category, constituent objects, and spatial relations. How do we accomplish this visual-cognitive feat? The commonly held explanation is known as the schema hypothesis, according to which a visual scene is rapidly identified as a member of a semantic category, and predictions generated from the scene category are then used to aid subsequent object identification. In this paper I will first outline and offer a critique of the evidence that has been taken to support the schema hypothesis. I will then offer an alternative framework for understanding scene processing, which I will call the local-processing hypothesis. This hypothesis assumes a modular, informationally-encapsulated architecture, and explicitly includes the role of covert visual attention in scene processing.     

Race,Gender, and Sexual Orientation in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic: Evaluating an Intervention for Leaders of Diverse Communities

This article discusses the implementation and evaluation of an HIV/AIDS educational intervention for college student leaders in African-American, Latino, feminist, and gay and lesbian campus organizations.     

Simple reaction time and predictive tracking in Parkinson's disease: do they converge on a single, fixed impairment of preparation?

Patients with Parkinson's disease exhibit a number. of abnormalities that seem more marked in circumstances in which stimulus and response are predictable in advance. In this article, we consider the prolonged movement onset latencies exhibited by Parkinsonian subjects in the tracking of predictable targets and in the simple reaction time (RT) task. It has been suggested that the performance impairments on both these tasks stem from a common planning deficit. We argue that the Parkinsonian tendency to refrain from predictive tracking cannot be ascribed to an inability to anticipate due to a planning deficit. The data are better accommodated by our alternative thesis that when Parkinsonians' response initiation lags behind that of normal subjects, this is a result of a strategic adaptation to an impairment of the accuracy of movements guided by an internal representation of the target. Our conclusion, that the primary impairment of predictive tracking is one of inaccurate movement execution rather than delayed response initiation, precludes postulation of the same deficit as a source of the selective prolongation of simple RT sometimes found in Parkinson's disease. Moreover, an analysis of the processing demands of the two tasks shows that the predictability that characterizes each of them is quite different in nature. Hence, the impairments in predictive tracking and simple RT tasks are unlikely to stem from a single mechanism that is defective in Parkinson's disease.     

Stimulus discrimination following covert attentional orienting to an exogenous cue.

Five experiments explored exogenous covert visual-attentional orienting following a brief peripheral cue. On each trial an attentional cue was followed by a stimulus in an empty field at 1 of 8 locations on an imaginary circle centered on the fixation point. The cued area size and the cue-target spatial relation were manipulated. Accuracy and response time were affected by the exogenous cue validity. Attention was allocated to a specific location in a visual quadrant: A target at an uncued location in a quadrant was not facilitated as much as target at the cued location, and a target in a different quadrant was inhibited in relation to a neutral condition. Cuing 2 locations in a quadrant was not as facilitative for targets at the cued locations or as inhibitive for targets at other locations compared with cuing a single location in a quadrant. Results are discussed in the context of several extent models of covert visual-spatial attention.     

The Role of Fixation Position in Detecting Scene Changes Across Saccades

Target objects presented within color images of naturalistic scenes were deleted or rotated during a saccade to or from the target object or to a control region of the scene. Despite instructions to memorize the details of the scenes and to monitor for object changes, viewers frequently failed to notice the changes. However, the failure to detect change was mediated by three other important factors: First, accuracy generally increased as the distance between the changing region and the fixation immediately before or after the change decreased. Second, changes were sometimes initially missed, but subsequently noticed when the changed region was later refixated. Third, when an object disappeared from a scene, detection of that disappearance was greatly improved when the deletion occurred during the saccade toward that object. These results suggest that fixation position and saccade direction play an important role in determining whether changes will be detected. It appears that more information can be retained across views than has been suggested by previous studies.