Setting things straight: A comparison of measures of saccade trajectory deviation

In eye movements, saccade trajectory deviation has often been used as a physiological operationalization of visual attention, distraction, or the visual system’s prioritization of different sources of information. However, there are many ways to measure saccade trajectories and to quantify their deviation. This may lead to noncomparable results and poses the problem of choosing a method that will maximize statistical power. Using data from existing studies and from our own experiments, we used principal components analysis to carry out a systematic quantification of the relationships among eight different measures of saccade trajectory deviation and their power to detect the effects of experimental manipulations, as measured by standardized effect size. We concluded that (1) the saccade deviation measure is a good default measure of saccade trajectory deviation, because it is somewhat correlated with all other measures and shows relatively high effect sizes for two well-known experimental effects; (2) more generally, measures made relative to the position of the saccade target are more powerful; and (3) measures of deviation based on the early part of the saccade are made more stable when they are based on data from an eyetracker with a high sampling rate. Our recommendations may be of use to future eye movement researchers seeking to optimize the designs of their studies.     

No pairing problem

Many have thought that there is a problem with causal commerce between immaterial souls and material bodies. In Physicalism or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim attempts to spell out that problem. Rather than merely posing a question or raising a mystery for defenders of substance dualism to answer or address, he offers a compelling argument for the conclusion that immaterial souls cannot causally interact with material bodies. We offer a reconstruction of that argument that hinges on two premises: Kim’s Dictum and the Nowhere Man principle. Kim’s Dictum says that causation requires a spatial relation. Nowhere Man says that souls can’t be in space. By our lights, both premises can be called into question. We’ll begin our evaluation of the argument by pointing out some consequences of Kim’s Dictum. For some, these will be costs. We will then present two defeaters for Kim’s Dictum and a critical analysis of Kim’s case for Nowhere Man. The upshot is that Kim’s argument against substance dualism fails.     

Community responses to a suicidal crisis: implications for suicide prevention

We conducted a cross‐sectional, random‐digit‐dial survey to evaluate public responses to a hypothetical question: “If someone you knew was suicidal, what would you do first?” Younger people were more likely to call a suicide hotline, and less likely to go to an emergency room (ER) or call 911; immigrants (in the U.S. <15 years) were more likely to call 911, and less likely to call a suicide hotline; African Americans were more likely to go to the ER and call 911; Hispanics were more likely to call 911 but less likely to call a suicide hotline. These results suggest that public messages about hotlines and emergency options for suicidal patients need to be tailored to relevant population characteristics including age, education, ethnicity, and language preferences.     

Recruitment Consultant Revenue: Relationships with IQ,personality, and emotional intelligence

The objective of this paper is to address the predictive validity of the workplace Swinburne University Emotional Intelligence Test. The first aim of this research project was to identify whether financial revenue earned by consultants in an Australian professional recruitment company were related to their levels of emotional intelligence (EI). The second aim was to assess whether EI competencies were more strongly related to revenue performance than measures of IQ and personality. The study consisted of 100 recruitment consultants from a large Australian‐based company who had their IQ assessed and completed a questionnaire battery consisting of measures of personality and EI. Revenue accrued by the recruitment consultants was also collected and related to the psychometric measures. Results showed that emotional competencies and personality traits are valuable predictors of job performance as measured by the revenue accrued by recruitment consultants. Further to this, the EI competencies were observed to be more strongly related to this measure of performance, and were able to predict a significant proportion of variance in performance in comparison to IQ and personality.     

The influences of intrinsic motivation on execution of social behaviour within the theory of planned behaviour

The present study examined the utility of two forms of measurement of intrinsic motivation in increasing the predictive validity of the theory of planned behaviour. Self‐report questionnaires were administered to school pupils (n = 174), University students (n = 129) and adults (n = 157). The data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis. Confirmatory analysis supported discriminant validity between Forms A and B measures of intrinsic motivation. In addition, hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that Form B measure of intrinsic motivation increased effectiveness of the theory of planned behaviour in predicting intentions and social behaviour. Further, the regression analysis showed that age and past behaviour did not reduce the effects observed for intrinsic motivation. It is recommended that intrinsic motivation could increase the predictive utility of the theory of planned behaviour. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Habituation and novelty detection fNIRS brain responses in 5‐ and 8‐month‐old infants: The Gambia and UK

The first 1,000 days of life are a critical window of vulnerability to exposure to socioeconomic and health challenges (i.e. poverty/undernutrition). The Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project has been established to deliver longitudinal measures of brain development from 0 to 24 months in UK and Gambian infants and to assess the impact of early adversity. Here results from the Habituation‐Novelty Detection (HaND) functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) task at 5 and 8 months are presented (N = 62 UK; N = 115 Gambia). In the UK cohort distinct patterns of habituation and recovery of response to novelty are seen, becoming more robust from 5 to 8 months of age. In The Gambia, an attenuated habituation response is evident: a larger number of trials are required before the response sufficiently suppresses relative to the response during the first presented trials. Furthermore, recovery of response to novelty is not evident at 5 or 8 months of age. As this longitudinal study continues in The Gambia, the parallel collection of socioeconomic, caregiving, health and nutrition data will allow us to stratify how individual trajectories of habituation and recovery of response to novelty associate with different risk factors and adaptive mechanisms in greater depth. Given the increasing interest in the use of neuroimaging methods within global neurocognitive developmental studies, this study provides a novel cross‐culturally appropriate paradigm for the study of brain responses associated with attention and learning mechanisms across early development.