Adoption and maintenance of physical activity: Planning interventions in young, middle-aged, and older adults

Young, middle-aged, and older adults in orthopaedic outpatient rehabilitation (N?=?373) were randomly assigned to either an interviewer-assisted or a standard-care self-administered planning intervention. Physical activity planning consisted of specifying action plans to facilitate action initiation, and coping plans to overcome barriers. The interviewer-assisted condition led to more complete action plans and a longer duration of physical activities up to six months after discharge. Regarding coping planning, older and middle-aged adults benefited more from interviewer-assisted planning while younger adults benefited more from self-administered planning. Planning as such was found to be an effective tool for enactment irrespective of chronological age. The delayed effect of coping planning on enactment suggests that coping planning is important for long-term maintenance.     

Enhanced old–new recognition and source memory for faces of cooperators and defectors in a social-dilemma game

A popular assumption in evolutionary psychology is that the human mind comprises specialized cognitive modules for social exchange, including a module that serves to enhance memory for faces of cheaters. In the present study, participants played a trust game with computerized opponents, who either defected or cooperated. In a control condition, no interaction took place. In a surprise memory test, old–new recognition for faces and source memory for the associated cooperative or non-cooperative behavior were assessed. A multinomial model was used to measure old–new discrimination, source memory, and guessing biases separately. Inconsistent with the assumption of a memory mechanism that focuses exclusively on cheating, the present study showed enhanced old–new discrimination and source memory for both cooperators and defectors. Rarity of the behavior strategies within the experiment modulated source memory, but only when the differences in base rates were extreme. The findings can be attributed to a mechanism that focuses on exchange-relevant information and flexibly adapts to take into account the relative significance of this information in the encoding context, which may be more beneficial than focusing exclusively on cheaters.     

Seriousness checks are useful to improve data validity in online research

Nonserious answering behavior increases noise and reduces experimental power; it is therefore one of the most important threats to the validity of online research. A simple way to address the problem is to ask respondents about the seriousness of their participation and to exclude self-declared nonserious participants from analysis. To validate this approach, a survey was conducted in the week prior to the German 2009 federal election to the Bundestag. Serious participants answered a number of attitudinal and behavioral questions in a more consistent and predictively valid manner than did nonserious participants. We therefore recommend routinely employing seriousness checks in online surveys to improve data validity.     

Blindness to response-compatible stimuli in the psychological refractory period paradigm

This study investigated the conditions under which the processing in a speeded response task interferes with concurrent processing in a visual encoding task. Three experiments used a dual-task paradigm, in which a speeded left or right response to at one was combined with the identification of a masked left-or right pointing arrow following the tone with variable SOA. Two additional experiments tested the impact of the presentation of pure tone on visual encoding.There were four major findings. First, an unspecific decrease in identification accuracy was observed with decreasing SOA. Second, a blindness to response-compatible stimuli was observed with speeded responses. Third, a specific interference was found between low- and high-pitched tones and left- or right-pointing arrows. Fourth, the specific tone-arrow interference modulated the specific responsearrow interference when the task allowed both to occur simultaneously. The present findings, which suggest both procedural and structural interference between response preparation and stimulus encoding, are discussed in terms of a two-stage model of action planning.     

Zur Anerkennung psychotherapeutischer Verfahren als Verfahren im Rahmen der Krankenversorgung durch die gesetzlichen Krankenkassen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: VI. Consonants and vowels are remembered as subsets of distinctive features

An attempt was made to examine the manner in which consonants and vowels are coded in short-term memory. under identical recall conditions. Ss were presented with sequences of consonant-vowel digrams for serial recall. Sequences were composed of randomly presented consonants paired with/a/ or randomly presented vowels paired with /d/. Halle’s distinctive feature system was used to generate predictions concerning the frequency of intrusion errors. among phonemes. These predictions were based on the assumption that phonemes are discriminated in memory in terms of their component distinctive features, so that intrusions should most frequently occur between phonemes sharing similar distinctive features. The analysis of intrusion errors revealed that each consonant and vowel phoneme was coded m short-term memory by a particular combination of distinctive features which differed from one phoneme to another. A given phoneme was coded by the same set of distinctive features regardless of the number of syllables in the sequence. However, distinctive feature theories were not able to predict the frequency of intrusion errors for phonemes presented in the middle serial positions of a sequence with 100% accuracy. The results of the experiment support the notion that consonant and vowel phonemes are coded in a similar manner in STM and that this coding involves the retention of a specific set of distinctive features for each phoneme.     

A high-speed algorithm for computing conditional probabilities of substrings of sequentially observed data

An algorithm is described that computes relative frequencies of occurrence of all arbitrarily long substrings of sequential data, such as are obtained from experiments in learning/memory and verbal interaction. The algorithm offers high speed and provides systematization for the computation of empirical conditional probabilities. Use of this algorithm allows application of probabilistic and information theoretic disciplines to reveal dependencies between events separated arbitrarily in time.