Using postgraduate students' evaluations of research experience to benchmark departments and faculties: Issues and challenges

Background The introduction of the Australian Research Training Scheme has been a strong reason for assuring the quality of the research higher degree (RHD) experience; if students experience poor supervision, an unsupportive climate, and inadequate infrastructure, prior research suggests RHD students will be less likely to complete their degree, with negative consequences for the student, the university, and society at large. Aims The present study examines the psychometric properties of a survey instrument, the Student Research Experience Questionnaire (SREQ), for measuring the RHD experience of currently enrolled students. The core scales of the SREQ focus on student experiences of Supervision; Infrastructure; Intellectual and Social Climate; and Generic Skills Development. Sample Participants were 2,213 postgraduate research students of a large, research‐intensive Australian university. Results Preliminary factor analyses conducted at the student level supported the a priori four factors that the SREQ was designed to measure. However, multi‐level analyses indicated that there was almost no differentiation between faculties or departments nested with faculties, suggesting that the SREQ responses are not appropriate for benchmarking faculties or departments. Conclusions Consistent with earlier research based on comparisons across universities, the SREQ is shown to be almost completely unreliable in terms of benchmarking faculties or departments within a university.     

Conflict in object affordance revealed by grip force

Viewing objects can result in automatic, partial activation of motor plans associated with them-"object affordance". Here, we recorded grip force simultaneously from both hands in an object affordance task to investigate the effects of conflict between coactivated responses. Participants classified pictures of objects by squeezing force transducers with their left or right hand. Responses were faster on trials where the object afforded an action with the same hand that was required to make the response (congruent trials) compared to the opposite hand (incongruent trials). In addition, conflict between coactivated responses was reduced if it was experienced on the preceding trial, just like Gratton adaptation effects reported in "conflict" tasks (e.g., Eriksen flanker). This finding suggests that object affordance demonstrates conflict effects similar to those shown in other stimulus-response mapping tasks and thus could be integrated into the wider conceptual framework on overlearnt stimulus-response associations. Corrected erroneous responses occurred more frequently when there was conflict between the afforded response and the response required by the task, providing direct evidence that viewing an object activates motor plans appropriate for interacting with that object. Recording continuous grip force, as here, provides a sensitive way to measure coactivated responses in affordance tasks.     

Analyse d'une Sepreuve d'image mentale chez des adolescents presentant des difficultis d'apprentissage scolaire1

Le travail faisant l'objet de cet article s'inscrit dans le cadre d'un programme de recherche plus large qui s'intéresse à la variabilité individuelle des processus cognitifs et à son influence éventuelle sur les lois générates du développement de l'intelligence. Une partie des résultats a déjàété présentée dans d'autres publications auxquelles le lecteur pourra se référer pour plus de détails (par exemple, Rieben et al., 1983). Nous nous contenterons de les décrire brièvement afin d'introduire l'aspect spécifique sur lequel nous nous sommes centrées ici.     

From Persecution to Depression: A Case of Chronic Depression—Associating the Rorschach,the TAT,and Winnicott

In this article, I discuss a case study of a patient with depression, paranoid ideation, and other psychiatric difficulties who presented in a state of acute crisis. I review the Swiss Lausanne model of Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) interpretation, focusing on a psychoanalytic understanding of special contents and verbalizations. I then present a review of Comprehensive System (Exner, 2003) Structural Summary variables based on a modified Rorschach administration, while qualifying the meanings of these variables in light of the modified procedure. I conclude with a review of Winnicott's (1969) ideas on the paranoid potential, tie it to the main points of the case, and offer a 5-year follow-up of the patient's treatment. The case offers an approach to personality assessment that is informed by an international theory built on psychology and philosophy, and offers support for the use of an alternative theory-based, psychoanalytic method of data analysis.     

The privileged role of location in visual working memory

Reports have conflicted about the possible special role of location in visual working memory (WM). One important question is: Do we maintain the locations of objects in WM even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Here we used a continuous response scale to study the types of reporting errors that participants make when objects are presented at the same or at different locations in space. When several objects successively shared the same location, participants exhibited a higher tendency to report features of the wrong object in memory; that is, they responded with features that belonged to objects retained in memory but not probed at retrieval. On the other hand, a similar effect was not observed when objects shared a nonspatial feature, such as color. Furthermore, the effect of location on reporting errors was present even when its manipulation was orthogonal to the task at hand. These findings are consistent with the view that binding together different nonspatial features of an object in memory might be mediated through an object’s location. Hence, spatial location may have a privileged role in WM. The relevance of these findings to conceptual models, as well as to neural accounts of visual WM, is discussed.     

Space and the parietal cortex

Current views of the parietal cortex have difficulty accommodating the human inferior parietal lobe (IPL) within a simple dorsal versus ventral stream dichotomy. In humans, lesions of the right IPL often lead to syndromes such as hemispatial neglect that are seemingly in accord with the proposal that this region has a crucial role in spatial processing. However, recent imaging and lesion studies have revealed that inferior parietal regions have non-spatial functions, such as in sustaining attention, detecting salient events embedded in a sequence of events and controlling attention over time. Here, we review these findings and show that spatial processes and the visual guidance of action are only part of the repertoire of parietal functions. Although sub-regions in the human superior parietal lobe and intraparietal sulcus contribute to vision-for-action and spatial functions, more inferior parietal regions have distinctly non-spatial attributes that are neither conventionally 'dorsal' nor conventionally 'ventral' in nature.