Switching between tasks and responses: a developmental study

Task switching requires the ability to flexibly switch between task rules and responses, and is sensitive to developmental change. We tested the hypothesis that developmental changes in task switch performance are associated with changes in the facilitating or interfering effect of the previously retrieved stimulus-response (S-R) association. Three age groups (7-8-year-olds, 10-12-year-olds and 20-25-year-olds) performed a two-choice reaction time (RT) task in which spatially compatible or incompatible responses were required. The RT costs associated with switching between tasks were larger when responses were repeated than when responses were alternated. Younger children showed a greater cost than adults when switching between tasks but repeating responses. This age difference decreased when the interval between the previous response and the upcoming stimulus increased. Switch costs were larger when switching to the compatible task than to the incompatible task, but this effect did not differ between age groups. These findings suggest that young children build up stronger transient associations between task sets and response sets, which interfere with their ability to switch to currently intended actions. A similar pattern has previously been observed for older adults (Mayr, 2001), suggesting a common contributor to task switching deficits across the life span.     

Spiritual care as eHealth: a systematic review

A systematic review was undertaken of the literature on the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT's) in the provision and support of religious and spiritual care in healthcare. Indexes such as Medline, PsychoINFO and Proquest Religion were searched. The review found little systematic study of the effectiveness of the Internet and other ICT's in religious and spiritual care. It is believed that the results of this review provide a basis for promise spiri care in the further explora of the potential and of ICT's for tual healthcare.     

Wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge of adults and children in a virtual environment: The role of landmarks

This study investigated the effect of different organizations of landmark-location pairings as fine-space information on wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge on a total of 90 participants: 30 second graders, 30 sixth graders, and 30 adults. All participants had to find their way to a goal in a virtual environment with either randomized or categorical landmarks, or without any landmarks. Thereafter, they had to find the shortest way from the start position to the goal in two consecutive trials (wayfinding performance), and they had to solve a number of spatial knowledge tasks. The results showed that independent of their categorical function, the existence of landmarks influenced the way-finding performance of adults and children in the same way. Whereas the presence of landmarks had no effect on spatial survey knowledge, landmark knowledge itself was influenced by the categorical function of the landmarks presented. Moreover, second graders showed limited achievement compared to adults independent of the existence of landmarks. The main results implicate firstly that children at school age indeed are able to use landmark-location pairings as fine-space information like adults during learning an unknown environmental space, and secondly that a dissociation between wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge might exist.     

Anxiety meets fear in perception of dynamic expressive gaze

This study investigated in 2 experiments whether reflexive cuing of attention that occurs after perception of a gaze cue is greater for fearful than for happy faces in normal participants, as hypothesized from a social neuroscience perspective. To increase neuroecological validity, dynamic stimulus presentation was used to display faces that simultaneously morphed from a neutral expression into a happy or fearful one and shifted eye gaze from the center to the periphery. Shifts of attention resulting from a natural fearful gaze were expected to be related to participants' anxiety traits, in agreement with the often found increased selective attention to threat in anxious participants. Both hypotheses were confirmed: Fearful faces induced stronger gaze cuing than happy faces, and the strength of this cuing effect was correlated to participants' anxiety levels. These results suggest a neural network, which integrates the processing of gaze, expression, and emotional states to adaptively prime vigilance under threatening circumstances.     

An investigation of appearance motives for tanning: The development and evaluation of the Physical Appearance Reasons For Tanning Scale (PARTS) and its relation to sunbathing and indoor tanning intentions

Motives for UV exposure have been shown to be related to appearance concerns, yet little research has examined specific tan appearance attitudes. Given this lacuna, Study 1 involved the identification of six factors among college female tanners: general attractiveness, media influence, family/friends influence, physical fitness appearance, acne reasons, and skin aging concerns. In Study 2, a separate sample of college female tanners were used to validate a higher order factor model, which demonstrated acceptable fit. Additionally, the factors converged in the expected directions, with the general attractiveness and skin aging concerns being the best correlate of UV exposure and sun-protection intentions. The relevance of these findings to skin cancer prevention is discussed.     

Processing the noun phrase versus sentence coordination ambiguity: thematic information does not completely eliminate processing difficulty

When faced with the noun phrase (NP) versus sentence (S) coordination ambiguity as in, for example, The thief shot the jeweller and the cop ..., readers prefer the reading with NP-coordination (e.g., "The thief shot the jeweller and the cop yesterday") over one with two conjoined sentences (e.g., "The thief shot the jeweller and the cop panicked"). A corpus study is presented showing that NP-coordinations are produced far more often than S-coordinations, which in frequency-based accounts of parsing might be taken to explain the NP-coordination preference. In addition, we describe an eye-tracking experiment investigating S-coordinated sentences such as Jasper sanded the board and the carpenter laughed, where the poor thematic fit between carpenter and sanded argues against NP-coordination. Our results indicate that information regarding poor thematic fit was used rapidly, but not without leaving some residual processing difficulty. This is compatible with claims that thematic information can reduce but not completely eliminate garden-path effects.     

Mix, a program for pseudorandomization

In psychological experiments involving multiple trials, the order in which individual trials are presented to participants influences the results obtained. For this reason, experimenters often create carefully constrained experimental lists or check randomly generated lists to avoid known causes of order artifacts (e.g., short-term stimulus or response repetition). Creating appropriately structured pseudorandom lists can be a difficult and time-consuming task in generating psychological experiments. Mix is a Windows program that can generate pseudorandomized orders according to complex, user-specified constraints. Mix can be used to generate a novel item order for each individual participant, even for complex experiments in which stimulus and/or response repetition is an experimental variable of interest, or for which automated randomization would not normally be possible. The program also contains a number of other practical features for generating files for use with a variety of experiment control software. A Mix executable for Windows, a complete manual, and terms of use are available at www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/maarten.van-casteren/Mix.htm. Use is limited to academic or other nonprofit applications.     

The effects of self-focused attention, performance demand, and dispositional sexual self-consciousness on sexual arousal of sexually functional and dysfunctional men

Sexually functional (N=26) and sexually dysfunctional heterosexual men with psychogenic erectile disorder (N=23) viewed two sexually explicit videos. Performance demand was manipulated through verbal instruction that a substantial genital response was to be expected from the videos. Self-focused attention was manipulated by introducing a camera pointed at the participant. Dispositional self-consciousness was assessed by questionnaire. Performance demand was found to independently inhibit the genital response. No main effect of self-focus was found. Self-focus inhibited genital response in men scoring high on general and sexual self-consciousness traits, whereas it enhanced penile tumescence in low self-conscious men. Inhibition effects were found in both volunteers and patients. No interaction effects of performance demand and self-focus were found. Subjective sexual arousal in sexually functional men was highest in the self-focus condition. In sexually dysfunctional men, subjective sexual response proved dependent on locus of attention as well as presentation order.     

Genetic and environmental mechanisms underlying stability and change in problem behaviors at ages 3, 7, 10, and 12

Maternal ratings on internalizing (INT) and externalizing (EXT) behaviors were collected in a large, population-based longitudinal sample. The numbers of participating twin pairs at ages 3, 7, 10, and 12 were 5,602, 5,115, 2,956, and 1,481, respectively. Stability in both behaviors was accounted for by genetic and shared environmental influences. The genetic contribution to stability (INT: 43%; EXT: 60%) resulted from the fact that a subset of genes expressed at an earlier age was still active at the next time point. A common set of shared environmental factors operated at all ages (INT: 47%; EXT: 34%). The modest contribution of nonshared environmental factors (INT: 10%; EXT: 6%) could not be captured by a simple model. Significant age-specific influences were found for all components, indicating that genetic and environmental factors also contributed to changes in problem behavior.     

A model for evidence accumulation in the lexical decision task

We present a new model for lexical decision, REM-LD, that is based on REM theory (e.g., ). REM-LD uses a principled (i.e., Bayes' rule) decision process that simultaneously considers the diagnosticity of the evidence for the 'WORD' response and the 'NONWORD' response. The model calculates the odds ratio that the presented stimulus is a word or a nonword by averaging likelihood ratios for lexical entries from a small neighborhood of similar words. We report two experiments that used a signal-to-respond paradigm to obtain information about the time course of lexical processing. Experiment 1 verified the prediction of the model that the frequency of the word stimuli affects performance for nonword stimuli. Experiment 2 was done to study the effects of nonword lexicality, word frequency, and repetition priming and to demonstrate how REM-LD can account for the observed results. We discuss how REM-LD could be extended to account for effects of phonology such as the pseudohomophone effect, and how REM-LD can predict response times in the traditional 'respond-when-ready' paradigm.