Cognitive Load and Prism Adaptation

Subjects wore goggles with prisms that laterally displaced the visual field (rightward by 11.4°) and with full view of the limb engaged in paced (2-s rate) sagittal pointing at either an implicit (“straight ahead of the nose”) target (Experiment 1) or an explicit (positioned leftward by 11.4°) target (in Experiment 2). In experimental conditions, subjects performed a secondary cognitive task (mental arithmetic) simultaneously during target pointing. In control conditions, no cognitive load was imposed. Aftereffect measures of adaptation to the prismatic displacement were not substantially different when problem solving was required, but terminal error of the exposure pointing task was reliably affected by cognitive load. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of separable mechanisms for adaptive coordination and adaptive alignment. Adaptive coordination may be mediated by strategically flexible coordinative linkage between sensory–motor systems (eye–head and hand—head), but spatial alignment seems to be mediated by adaptive encoders within coordinatively linked subsystems. If the coordination task involves predominately automatic processing, coordinative linkage can be frequent enough under cognitive load for substantial realignment to occur even though exposure performance (adaptive coordination) may be less than optimal.     

Where does work stress come from? A generalizability analysis of stress in police officers

Differences among workers and workplace stressors both contribute to perceiving work as stressful. However, the relative importance of these sources to work stress is not well delineated. Moreover, the extent to which work stress additionally reflects unique matches between specific workers and particular job stressors is also unclear. In this study, we use generalizability theory to specify and compare sources of variance in stress associated with police work. US police officers (N?=?115) provided ratings of 60 stressors commonly associated with policing duties. Primary and secondary stress appraisal ratings reflected differences among officers in tendencies to generally perceive work stressors as stressful (14–15% officer effect), and also agreement among officers in viewing some stressors as more stressful than others (18–19% stressor effect). However, ratings especially reflected distinct pairings of officers and stressors (38–41% interaction effect). Additional analyses revealed individual differences and stressor characteristics associated with each variance component, including an officer?×?stressor interaction – compared to officers low in neuroticism, highly neurotic officers provided lower primary appraisal ratings of stressors generally seen as not serious, and also higher primary appraisal ratings of stressors that were seen as serious. We discuss implications of the current approach for the continued study of stress at work.     

Psychodiagnostic Evaluation of Johnny

Rabin, A. I., Growing up in the Kibbutz, New York; Springer Publishing Company. 1965. 230 pp. Reviewed by Haim G. Ginott     

Types of responses in 4-5-year-old children in conservation, classification, and theory of mind tasks

This study analyzes the type of responses that children between 4 and 5 years of age give to different tasks: conservation, classification and tasks of the theory of mind (ToM). Types of responses were observed with the Observation of Cognitive and Meta-cognitive Skills Inventory, which identifies: attention, receptive and expressive language, planning processes, and meta-cognitive processes. Significant differences were found according to the variable age in: (a) the use of attentional strategies in performance of ToM tasks, (b) the use of receptive and expressive language in the performance of all tasks, (c) the use of planning processes in the performance of conservation tasks; and (d) the use of meta-cognitive processes to solve ToM tasks.     

Perceptions of High-Risk Care and Barriers to Care Among Women at Risk for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer following Genetic Counseling in the Community Setting

Data are limited regarding barriers to care among women, with or at risk for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC), following genetic counseling in the community setting. Using a telephone survey, we retrospectively addressed perceptions of post-genetic counseling medical care and barriers to care among 69 at-risk women from the non-academic setting. Of these, all agreed that following cancer screening recommendations was better than not following them; none felt recommendations were too difficult to follow; all believed screening would help keep them healthy; 57% believed screening would prevent cancer. Twenty-five percent noted discomfort with breast imaging; 29% found ovarian cancer screening uncomfortable. Close to a quarter of participants reported difficulty deciding whether or not to undergo risk-reducing mastectomy while 10% noted difficulty deciding for or against bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. There were no perceived major barriers to care, although 38% felt that screening reminders would be helpful, and 10% needed more help in following through with care. Overall, participants believed that they were benefiting from their post-genetic counseling medical care. This work identified HBOC-related support needs to include: informational resources that promote improved understanding of cancer risk and high-risk management; screening reminder systems; and decision support tools.     

Differential Reinforcement in Simple Discrimination Learning in 10- to 20-Month-Old Toddlers

The Psychological Record - The present study examined two procedures for teaching simple discrimination to six toddlers aged 10- to 20-months. A pair of toys was displayed in the windows of an...     

Comparative analysis of the perception of school violence in teachers, pupils, and families

The main aim of the present study is to analyze the opinion of pupils, families and teachers in four European countries (Spain, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic) on the prevalence of violent behavior and other problematic aspects related to coexistence in schools, and on the way in which individuals are personally affected by them. For this purpose, a single instrument was used. From the results obtained it emerges, first of all, that there are significant differences depending on who is analyzing the school problems. Generally, families perceive the problems analyzed as less common and feel less affected by them personally. Hungary was considered to be the country with the lowest levels of school violence. Pupils indicate their concern about the high levels of lack of motivation or boredom, whilst teachers are more preoccupied about the serious problems of coexistence, due in particular to the presence or use of weapons and drugs and to intercultural conflicts.     

Implicit and explicit memory for affective passages in temporal lobectomy patients

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content, respectively, as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times; this target passage was alternated with other previously unread passages, and all passages had the same number of words. The Explicit Affective and Neutral Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding passage content. Verbal priming effects in terms of improved reading speed with repetition for the target but not non-target passages were found for patients with both left and right temporal lobectomies. As in the Burton, Rabin et al. [Burton, L., Rabin, L., Vardy, S.B., Frohlich, J., Wyatt, G., Dimitri, D., Constante, S., Guterman, E. (2004). Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages. Brain and Cognition, 54(3), 218-224] normative study, there were no interactions between this priming effect and affective/neutral content. For the explicit tasks, items from the repeated passages were remembered better than the unrepeated passages, and there was a trend for information from the affective passages to be remembered better than the neutral passages, similar to the normative pattern. The RTL group did not show the normative pattern of slower reading speed for affective compared to neutral passages that the LTL group showed. Thus, the present findings support the idea that intact right medial temporal structures are important for affective content to influence some aspects of verbal processing.