Selected Factors Influencing School Choice Among the Seventh-day Adventist Population in Southwest Michigan

One of the most significant problems currently facing Adventist schools in North America is declining enrollment in Grades K-12. It was the purpose of this study to determine if a relationship exists between school choice and parental perception of selected factors in Southwest Michigan. The author uses multiple regression analysis to explore which of the select factors influenced parents to make choices on where to enroll their children in school between church schools and public schools. The study found that there was a significant relationship between parental school choice and parents' perception of spiritual value-based education, the cost of education, academic program, who influenced school choice, safety in school, and awareness. There was no significant relationship between parental school choice and parents' perception of social factors and school proximity.     

Pacific Islands Families (PIF) Study: Behavioural Problems During Childhood

Pacific peoples represent one of the fastest growing population subgroups in New Zealand and suffer disproportionately from diabetes, obesity, and other diseases. There is little research on the predictors of behavioral problems in Pacific children or the role that cultural variables play in shaping the unique environments in which child development occurs This study aims to examine the: (1) prevalence of behavior problems at 2, 4, and 6 years-of-age among Pacific children, and (2) relationships between maternal, cultural, and socio-demographic factors and behavioral problems. Data were gathered from the Pacific Islands Families Study. Maternal reports of child behavior were obtained using the Child Behavior Checklist for over 1000 Pacific children. The prevalence of clinical internalizing problems at ages 2, 4, and 6 years was 16.8, 22 and 8.5%, and clinical externalizing was 6.7, 10.7, and 14.6% respectively. Significant risk factors associated with clinical internalizing were maternal depression, maternal smoking, intimate partner violence, and having a single mother. Significant risk factors for clinical externalizing were harsh parenting, maternal depression, having a New Zealand born mother, and low household income. Across dimensions, a protective factor was found for children with mothers who described themselves as strongly aligned with Pacific traditions. These findings contribute to the limited longitudinal data specific to children from different ethnic groups and demonstrate the importance of cultural factors in developmental outcomes.     

Priming in the attentional blink: Perception without awareness?

The attentional blink refers to a reduction in accuracy that occurs when observers are required to identify the second of two rapidly sequential targets. Even when the second target cannot be reported, however, it is still capable of priming the response to a subsequent related item. At issue in the present work was whether this priming is attributable mainly to conscious or unconscious processes. To answer this question, we used an exclusion procedure that permitted an assessment of the relative dominance of conscious and unconscious processes. The results showed that second targets that are identified incorrectly are nonetheless processed extensively outside of awareness. Moreover, this processing is sufficient to prime a subsequent response for at least 1 s after the onset of the prime.     

Structural equation modelling of human judgement

Structural equation modelling (SEM) is outlined and compared with two non-linear alternatives, artificial neural networks and “fast and frugal” models. One particular non-linear decision-making situation is discussed, that exemplified by a lexicographic semi-order. We illustrate the use of SEM on a dataset derived from 539 volunteers' responses to questions about food-related risks. Our conclusion is that SEM is a useful member of the armoury of techniques available to the student of human judgement: it subsumes several multivariate statistical techniques and permits their flexible combination, and it provides robust goodness-of-fit statistics and is available in (generally) easy-to-use computer packages. Although the number of tasks for which SEM provides a persuasive psychological model is small, it is very useful in identifying the important variables and their inter-relations that contribute to task performance, and thus can constitute a valuable intermediate staging point between raw data and a fully fledged psychological theory.     

Benefits to the Spanish research community of regional content expansion in Web of Science

The regional content expansion of Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of Science added approximately 1,600 journals to the database with a regional as opposed to international focus. Web of Science coverage has grown to reflect the changing nature of global research publication trends and the additional regional journals provide greater visibility to high quality local studies beyond their traditional boundaries. The cited references indexed from the regional journals represent the influence of those journals on both the global and local research communities. This study analyses the impact of adding Spanish regional journals to Web of Science on the publication and citation patterns of Spanish research. The findings demonstrate a recent increase in research output from Spain and this is explained by more Spanish research being produced rather than due to the indexing of more Spanish journals; indeed it is shown that the majority of Spanish research is not published in Spanish journals. An analysis of Spanish journal citations uncovers a Spanish regional citation network previously undetected and serves as valuable information for evaluators of Spanish journals.     

Irrelevant sound effects amongst younger and older adults: Objective findings and subjective insights

Two experiments examine the effects of extraneous speech and nonspeech noise on a visual short-term memory task administered to younger and older adults. Experiment 1 confirms an earlier report that playing task-irrelevant speech is no more distracting for older adults than for younger adults (Rouleau & Belleville, 1996), indicating that “irrelevant sound effects” in short-term memory operate in a different manner to recalling targets in the presence of competing speech (Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002). Experiment 2 extends this result to nonspeech noise and demonstrates that the result cannot be ascribed to hearing difficulties amongst the older age group, although the data also show that older adults rated the noise as less annoying and uncomfortable than younger adults. Implications for theories of the irrelevant sound effect, and for cognitive ageing, are discussed.     

The effects of rime on auditory recency and the suffix effect

Two experiments are reported that consider the role of rime as the content of Precategorical Acoustic Storage (PAS). It was hypothesised that with auditory presentation of lists the rime component of the final item (the final vowel and, optionally, terminal consonant cluster of a word) was preserved in PAS and this served as a recall cue to identify the final item. Experiment 1 compared recall performance when the terminal or penultimate words rhymed with an irrelevant stimulus suffix. A suffix that shared a rime with the terminal word was found to attenuate the suffix effect, in line with Carr and Miles (1997) and consistent with the use of PAS as a positional code. However, contrary to the hypothesis that PAS information is automatically used to reconstruct the final item, the suffix effect was no greater when the suffix rhymed with the penultimate item than when no relationship existed between the suffix and the final item. Experiment 2 demonstrated that when the terminal and penultimate words shared a rime there was a drop in recall performance for the final item but a corresponding increase in correct recall of the penultimate item. No such changes were observed when the rime was shared between terminal and antepenultimate items. It is suggested that adjacency of identical rimes allows improved reconstruction of item information at the expense of order information.     

The development of conscious control in childhood

Developmental data suggest that the growth of executive function in childhood can be understood in terms of the development of consciousness. According to the "levels of consciousness" (LOC) model, there are age-related increases in the highest degree of self-reflection or LOC that children are able to muster in response to situational demands. These increases in LOC with age have consequences for the quality of experience, the potential for recall, the complexity of children's explicit knowledge structures, and the possibility of the conscious control of thought, emotion, and action. The hierarchical LOCs identified by this analysis are also useful for understanding the complex structure of conscious experience in adults, and they provide a metric for measuring the level at which consciousness is operating in specific situations.