Beyond Consent: Building Trusting Relationships With Diverse Populations in Precision Medicine Research

With the growth of precision medicine research on health data and biospecimens, research institutions will need to build and maintain long-term, trusting relationships with patient-participants. While trust is important for all research relationships, the longitudinal nature of precision medicine research raises particular challenges for facilitating trust when the specifics of future studies are unknown. Based on focus groups with racially and ethnically diverse patients, we describe several factors that influence patient trust and potential institutional approaches to building trustworthiness. Drawing on these findings, we suggest several considerations for research institutions seeking to cultivate long-term, trusting relationships with patients: (1) Address the role of history and experience on trust, (2) engage concerns about potential group harm, (3) address cultural values and communication barriers, and (4) integrate patient values and expectations into oversight and governance structures.     

Visual search in scenes involves selective and nonselective pathways

How does one find objects in scenes? For decades, visual search models have been built on experiments in which observers search for targets, presented among distractor items, isolated and randomly arranged on blank backgrounds. Are these models relevant to search in continuous scenes? This article argues that the mechanisms that govern artificial, laboratory search tasks do play a role in visual search in scenes. However, scene-based information is used to guide search in ways that had no place in earlier models. Search in scenes might be best explained by a dual-path model: a 'selective' path in which candidate objects must be individually selected for recognition and a 'nonselective' path in which information can be extracted from global and/or statistical information.     

Recognition without identification

The ability of people to recognize words that they could not identify was examined. After studying a list of 15 words, participants completed a word fragment test consisting of 4-letter fragments of both studied and nonstudied words. Whether they were able to solve a particular fragment or not, participants then made an episodic recognition judgment. Even when participants were unable to solve a fragment, their recognition accuracy was significantly higher than chance. This effect was significant when list length was increased, when 2-letter fragments were used, when first letters were excluded from fragments, and when the letter casing and the presentation modality were changed from study to test. It also occurred when participants attempted to identify fragments at study and rated words at test. Recognition without identification is attributed to the use of orthographic information when determining the familiarity of a test item.     

Normative data for the F(p) scale of the MMPI-2: implications for clinical and forensic assessment of malingering

Data from several clinical samples and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 standardization group are presented to familiarize the reader with response patterns of different groups on a new validity scale designed to assist in the identification of exaggeration or fabrication of psychological disturbance. Sensitivity-specificity analyses are included along with suggestions for use of the F(p) Scale with other validity scales. Cautions about setting single cutoff scores are also discussed.     

The control of fixation duration in visual search

A study is reported how fixation durations are affected as observers voluntarily use information in the visual environment to direct saccades in search of a target. In experiments with direction-coded displays, search fixation durations for correct and incorrectly directed saccades were comparable during image-driven/bottom-up search. In contrast, for knowledge-driven search, the relationship depended on peripheral preview. With ample access to peripheral preview, search fixation durations preceding correct saccades were shorter than those preceding incorrectly directed saccades. However, they were longer when preview was constrained by a gaze-contingent moving window. Fixation control was modeled as sigmoid functions.