Effects of repetition on age differences in associative recognition

The study reported here examined the effect of repetition on age differences in associative recognition using a paradigm designed to encourage recollection at test. Young and older adults studied lists of unrelated word pairs presented one, two, four, or eight times. Test lists contained old (intact) pairs, pairs consisting of old words that had been studied with other partners (rearranged lures), and pairs consisting of two unstudied words (new lures). Participants gave old/new responses and then indicated whether their responses were based on details that they could recollect or on familiarity. Older adults exhibited an ironic effect of repetition—an increase in false alarms on rearranged lures with more study opportunities—whereas young adults did not. Older adults also claimed to recall details of the study episode for rearranged lures whose constituent words were presented more frequently, but this was not true for young adults. Although both young and older adults said that they based correct rejections of rearranged lures on memory for details of the study episode, this effect was stronger for young adults. The observed age differences are consistent with older adults having reduced use of recollection in associative recognition tasks.     

The Five Senses of Haiti

The Five Senses of Haiti discusses a series of medical mission trips by physicians and medical students to the Central Plateau of Haiti delivering care in the outpatient setting. Practitioners describe their experiences through the use of their five senses to draw contrast between modern health care and medical practice in the developing world. Physicians in a resource poor setting are left without the usual diagnostic armamentarium and the safeguards and distractions of the modern hospital setting. This deficit creates an opportunity to devote time and focus to individual patients. Practicing medicine in this context clinicians use a heightened sense of awareness and increase their reliance on physical exam findings. Global medicine creates an opportunity for medical students to learn and physicians out of training to practice overlooked physical exam skills in the modern era. Physical exam findings and patient care yield diagnoses and fosters the bonds of the doctor-patient relationship.     

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name or produce an isolated musical note without the aid of a reference note. One skill thought to be unique to AP possessors is the ability to provide absolute intonation judgments (e.g., classifying an isolated note as “in-tune” or “out-of-tune”). Recent work has suggested that absolute intonation perception among AP possessors is not crystallized in a critical period of development, but is dynamically maintained by the listening environment, in which the vast majority of Western music is tuned to a specific cultural standard. Given that all listeners of Western music are constantly exposed to this specific cultural tuning standard, our experiments address whether absolute intonation perception extends beyond AP possessors. We demonstrate that non-AP listeners are able to accurately judge the intonation of completely isolated notes. Both musicians and nonmusicians showed evidence for absolute intonation recognition when listening to familiar timbres (piano and violin). When testing unfamiliar timbres (triangle and inverted sine waves), only musicians showed weak evidence of absolute intonation recognition (Experiment 2). Overall, these results highlight a previously unknown similarity between AP and non-AP possessors’ long-term musical note representations, including evidence of sensitivity to frequency.     

Computational cognitive modeling of the temporal dynamics of fatigue from sleep loss

Computational models have become common tools in psychology. They provide quantitative instantiations of theories that seek to explain the functioning of the human mind. In this paper, we focus on identifying deep theoretical similarities between two very different models. Both models are concerned with how fatigue from sleep loss impacts cognitive processing. The first is based on the diffusion model and posits that fatigue decreases the drift rate of the diffusion process. The second is based on the Adaptive Control of Thought – Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture and posits that fatigue decreases the utility of candidate actions leading to microlapses in cognitive processing. A biomathematical model of fatigue is used to control drift rate in the first account and utility in the second. We investigated the predicted response time distributions of these two integrated computational cognitive models for performance on a psychomotor vigilance test under conditions of total sleep deprivation, simulated shift work, and sustained sleep restriction. The models generated equivalent predictions of response time distributions with excellent goodness-of-fit to the human data. More importantly, although the accounts involve different modeling approaches and levels of abstraction, they represent the effects of fatigue in a functionally equivalent way: in both, fatigue decreases the signal-to-noise ratio in decision processes and decreases response inhibition. This convergence suggests that sleep loss impairs psychomotor vigilance performance through degradation of the quality of cognitive processing, which provides a foundation for systematic investigation of the effects of sleep loss on other aspects of cognition. Our findings illustrate the value of treating different modeling formalisms as vehicles for discovery.     

Conditional control in visual selection

Attention and eye movements provide a window into the selective processing of visual information. Evidence suggests that selection is influenced by various factors and is not always under the strategic control of the observer. The aims of this tutorial review are to give a brief introduction to eye movements and attention and to outline the conditions that help determine control. Evidence suggests that the ability to establish control depends on the complexity of the display as well as the point in time at which selection occurs. Stimulus-driven selection is more probable in simple displays than in complex natural scenes, but it critically depends on the timing of the response: Salience determines selection only when responses are triggered quickly following display presentation, and plays no role in longer-latency responses. The time course of selection is also important for the relationship between attention and eye movements. Specifically, attention and eye movements appear to act independently when oculomotor selection is quick, whereas attentional processes are able to influence oculomotor control when saccades are triggered only later in time. This relationship may also be modulated by whether the eye movement is controlled in a voluntary or an involuntary manner. To conclude, we present evidence that shows that visual control is limited in flexibility and that the mechanisms of selection are constrained by context and time. The outcome of visual selection changes with the situational context, and knowing the constraints of control is necessary to understanding when and how visual selection is truly controlled by the observer.     

Mind-wandering: phenomenology and function as assessed with a novel experience sampling method

Mind-wandering refers to the occurrence of thoughts whose content is both decoupled from stimuli present in the current environment and unrelated to the task being carried out at the moment of their occurrence. The core of this phenomenon is therefore stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thoughts (SITUTs). In the present study, we designed a novel experience sampling method which permitted to isolate SITUTs from other kinds of distractions (i.e., irrelevant interoceptive/exteroceptive sensory perceptions and interfering thoughts related to the appraisal of the current task). In Experiment 1, we examined the impact of SITUTs on the performance of the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; a Go/No-Go task). Analyses demonstrated that SITUTs impair SART performance to the same extent as irrelevant sensory perceptions. In Experiment 2, we further examined SITUTs in order to assess the possible functions of mind-wandering. We observed that the content of most of reported SITUTs refers to the anticipation and planning of future events. Furthermore, this “prospective bias” was increased when participants' attention had been oriented toward their personal goals before performing the SART. These data support the view that an important function of mind-wandering relates to the anticipation and planning of the future.     

The reliability of and the relation between non-symbolic numerical distance effects in comparison, same-different judgments and priming

The development of number processing is generally studied by examining the performance on basic number tasks (comparison task, same-different judgment, and priming task). Using these tasks, so-called numerical distance effects are obtained. All these effects are generally explained by assuming a magnitude representation related to a mental number line: magnitudes are represented from left to right with partially overlapping representations for nearby numbers. In this study, we compared the performance of adults on these different tasks using non-symbolic stimuli. First, we investigated whether the effects obtained in these behavioral tasks are reliable. Second, we examined the relation between the three different effects. The results showed that the observed effects in the case of the comparison task and the same-different task proved to be reliable. The numerical distance effect obtained in the priming task, however, was not reliable. In addition, a correlation was found between the distance effects in the comparison task and the same-different task. The priming distance effect did not correlate with the other two effects. These results suggest important differences between distance effects obtained under automatic and intentional task instructions regarding the use of them as indices of mathematical ability.     

Randomised controlled trial of a guided self-help treatment on the Internet for binge eating disorder

Binge eating disorder (BED) is a common and under-treated condition with major health implications. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) self-help manuals have proved to be efficient in BED treatment. Increasing evidence also support the use of new technology to improve treatment access and dissemination. This is the first randomised controlled study to evaluate the efficacy of an Internet guided self-help treatment programme, based on CBT, for adults with threshold and subthreshold BED. Seventy-four women were randomised into two groups. The first group received the six-month online programme with a six-month follow-up. The second group was placed in a six-month waiting list before participating in the six-month intervention. Guidance consisted of a regular e-mail contact with a coach during the whole intervention. Binge eating behaviour, drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction and interoceptive awareness significantly improved after the Internet self-help treatment intervention. The number of objective binge episodes, overall eating disorder symptoms score and perceived hunger also decreased. Improvements were maintained at six-month follow-up. Dropouts exhibited more shape concern and a higher drive for thinness. Overall, a transfer of CBT-based self-help techniques to the Internet was well accepted by patients, and showed positive results for eating disorders psychopathology.     

Behavioral interventions may prolong remission in patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBDs) are chronic, relapsing and remitting gastrointestinal conditions with no known cure. Previous studies have linked behavioral factors, including stress and medication adherence, to relapse.

Purpose

We sought to determine the effect of participation in a behavioral self-management program on incidence of flare within 12 months following behavioral intervention when compared to the natural history of flare incidence prior to program participation.

Results

Results from a 2-level regression model indicated that those participants in the treatment group were 57% less likely to flare in the following 12 months (compared to 18% in the control group). The decline in “flare odds” was about 2 times greater in treatment versus controls (OR = 0.52, t(34) = 2.07, p < 0.05). Office visits, ER visits, and disease severity (all p < 0.05) were identified as moderators of flare risk.

Conclusions

We have demonstrated 1) a statistical model estimating the likelihood of flare rates in the 12 months following a behavioral intervention for IBD (compared to a control condition), and 2) that the introduction of a behavioral intervention can alter the natural course of a chronic, relapsing and remitting gastrointestinal condition such as IBD.