Augmenting Visual Search Performance With Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS)

Military personnel endure rigorous and demanding man-hours designated to monitoring and locating targets in tasks such as cyber defense and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operators. These tasks are monotonous and repetitive, which can result in vigilance decrement. The objective of the study was to implement a form of noninvasive brain stimulation known as transcranial DC stimulation (tDCS) over the left frontal eye field (LFEF) region of the scalp to improve cognitive performance. The participants received anodal and cathodal stimulation of 2 mA for 30 min as well as placebo stimulation on 3 separate days while performing the task. The findings suggest that anodal and cathodal stimulation significantly improves detection accuracy. Also, a correlation was detected between percent of eye closure (PERCLOS) and blinking frequency in relation to stimulation condition. Our data suggest that tDCS over the LFEF would be a beneficial countermeasure to mitigate the vigilance decrement and improve visual search performance.     

Between ignorance and truth: Partition dependence and learning in judgment under uncertainty

In 3 studies, participants viewed sequences of multiattribute objects (e.g., colored shapes) appearing with varying frequencies and judged the likelihood of the attributes of those objects. Judged probabilities reflected a compromise between (a) the frequency with which each attribute appeared and (b) the ignorance prior probability cued by the number of distinct values that the focal attribute could take on. Thus, judged probabilities were partition dependent, varying with the number of events into which the state space was subjectively divided. This bias was diminished among participants more confident in what they learned, was strong and insensitive to level of confidence when ignorance priors were especially salient, and required ignorance priors to be salient only when probabilities were elicited (not during encoding).     

A paradoxical effect of presession attention on stereotypy: antecedent attention as an establishing, not an abolishing, operation

Previous studies have shown that presession attention for problem behavior can serve as an abolishing operation when attention functions as a positive reinforcer. In the current study, we show that the stereotypy of a child with severe disabilities was undifferentiated during standard analogue functional analysis conditions. However, when noncontingent presession attention was provided, stereotypy occurred for social attention as a positive reinforcer, suggesting that the antecedent manipulation functioned as an establishing operation.     

Effects of instruction presentation mode in comparative judgments

In each of two experiments, the comparative instructions in a symbolic comparison task were either varied randomly from trial to trial (mixed blocks) or left constant (pure blocks) within blocks of trials. In the first experiment, every stimulus was compared with every other stimulus. The symbolic distance effect (DE) was enhanced, and the semantic congruity effect (SCE) was significantly larger, when the instructions were randomized than when they were blocked. In a second experiment, each stimulus was paired with only one other stimulus. The SCE was again larger when instructions were randomized than when they were blocked. The enhanced SCE and DE with randomized instructions follow naturally from evidence accrual views of comparative judgments.     

APPLICANT REACTIONS TO PRE-EMPLOYMENT APPLICATION BLANKS: A LEGAL AND PROCEDURAL JUSTICE PERSPECTIVE

The current research investigated applicant reactions derived from common application blanks. Previous work has found applications to be riddled with legally inadvisable items, but limited research has attempted to understand how such items might affect applicants. By using organizational justice theory as a framework, two studies examined applicant reactions from two application blanks: a legally advisable application and a legally problematic application. It was found that applicants completing the legally problematic application had lower perceptions of justice and expressed higher litigation intentions compared to those completing the legally advisable application, especially for those that were rejected without an explanation.