Attending to the execution of a complex sensorimotor skill: expertise differences, choking, and slumps

A simulated baseball batting task was used to compare the relative effects of attending to extraneous information (tone frequency) and attending to skill execution (direction of bat movement) on performance and swing kinematics and to evaluate how these effects differ as a function of expertise. The extraneous dual task degraded batting performance in novices but had no significant effect on experts. The skill-focused dual task increased batting errors and movement variability for experts but had no significant effect on novices. For expert batters, accuracy in the skill-focused dual task was inversely related to the current level of performance. Expert batters were significantly more accurate in the skill-focused dual task when placed under pressure. These findings indicate that the attentional focus varies substantially across and within performers with different levels of expertise.     

Simplest tasks have greatest dual task interference with balance in brain injured adults

Attention difficulties and poor balance are both common sequel following a brain injury. This study aimed to determine whether brain injured adults had greater difficulty than controls in performing a basic balance task while concurrently completing several different cognitive tasks varying in visuo-spatial attentional load and complexity. Twenty brain injured adults and 20 age-, sex- and education level-matched controls performed a balance-only task (step stance held for 30 s), five cognitive-only tasks (simple and complex non-spatial, visuo-spatial, and a control articulation task), and both together (dual tasks). Brain injured adults showed a greater centre of pressure (COP) excursion and velocity in all conditions than controls. Brain injured adults also demonstrated greater interference with balance when concurrently performing two cognitive tasks than control subjects. These were the control articulation and the simple non-spatial task. It is likely that distractibility during these simple tasks contributed to an increase in COP motion and interference with postural stability in stance. Performing visuo-spatial tasks concurrently with the balance task did not result in any change in COP motion. Dual task interference in this group is thus unlikely to be due to structural interference. Similarly, as the more complex tasks did not uniformly result in increased interference, a reduction in attentional capacity in the brain injured population is unlikely to be the primary cause of dual task interference in this group.     

Ignoring famous faces: category-specific dilution of distractor interference

The extent to which famous distractor faces can be ignored was assessed in six experiments. Subjects categorized famous printed target names as those of pop stars or politicians, while attempting to ignore a flanking famous face distractor that could be congruent (e.g, a politician's name and face) or incongruent (e.g., a politician's name with a pop stars face). Congruency effects on reaction times indicated distractor intrusion. An additional, response-neutral flanker (neither pop star nor politician) could also be present. Congruency effects from the critical distractor face were reduced (diluted) by the presence of an intact anonymous face, but not by phase-shifted versions, inverted faces, or meaningful nonface objects. By contrast, congruency effects from other types of distracting objects (musical instruments, fruits), when printed names for these classes were categorized, were diluted equivalently by intact faces, phase-shifted faces, or meaningful nonface objects. Our results suggest that distractor faces act differently from other types of distractors, suffering from only face-specific capacity limits.     

Application of Herek's attitudes toward lesbians and gay men scale in The Netherlands

A national sample of 921 respondents from the Dutch population completed the translated, slightly modified version of Herek's Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Scale, originally developed in the USA for the assessment of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. The present study was the first attempt to test the applicability of the scale in the Netherlands. In line with previous American findings, all scale items loaded highly on one factor. The scores also correlated with another measure of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, namely, 'denial of equal rights' (r = .76), and with 'traditional view of women' (r = .48), 'importance of traditional marriage' (r = .53), and 'authoritarianism' (r = .31). Data support the scale's acceptable reliability and construct and discriminant validity.     

Temporal constraints on visual learning: a computational model

Given a constant stream of perceptual stimuli, how can the underlying invariances associated with a given input be learned? One approach consists of using generic truths about the spatiotemporal structure of the physical world as constraints on the types of quantities learned. The learning methodology employed here embodies one such truth: that perceptually salient properties (such as stereo disparity) tend to vary smoothly over time. Unfortunately, the units of an artificial neural network tend to encode superficial image properties, such as individual grey-level pixel values, which vary rapidly over time. However, if the states of units are constrained to vary slowly, then the network is forced to learn a smoothly varying function of the training data. We implemented this temporal-smoothness constraint in a backpropagation network which learned stereo disparity from random-dot stereograms. Temporal smoothness was formalized with the use of regularization theory by modifying the standard cost function minimised during training of a network. Temporal smoothness was found to be similar to other techniques for improving generalisation, such as early stopping and weight decay. However, in contrast to these, the theoretical underpinnings of temporal smoothing are intimately related to fundamental characteristics of the physical world. Results are discussed in terms of regularization theory and the physically realistic assumptions upon which temporal smoothing is based.     

Convergent behavioral and neuropsychological evidence for a distinction between identification and production forms of repetition priming

Four experiments examined a distinction between kinds of repetition priming which involve either the identification of the form or meaning of a stimulus or the production of a response on the basis of a cue. Patients with Alzheimer's disease had intact priming on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks and impaired priming on word-stem completion and category-exemplar production tasks. Division of study-phase attention in healthy participants reduced priming on word-stem completion and category-exemplar production tasks but not on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks. The parallel dissociations in normal and abnormal memory cannot be explained by implicit-explicit or perceptual-conceptual distinctions but are explained by an identification-production distinction. There may be separable cognitive and neural bases for implicit modulation of identification and production forms of knowledge.     

Storage of verbal associations is sufficient to activate the left medial temporal lobe

Neuroimaging studies have shown that memory encoding activates the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Many believe that these activations are related to novelty but it remains unproven which is critical - novelty detection or the rich associative encoding it triggers. We examined MTL activation during verbal associative encoding using functional magnetic resonance imaging. First, associative encoding activated left posterior MTL more than single word encoding even though novelty detection was matched, indicating not only that associative encoding activates the MTL particularly strongly, but also that activation does not require novelty detection. Moreover, it remains to be convincingly shown that novelty detection alone does produce such activation. Second, repetitive associative encoding produced less MTL activation than initial associative encoding, indicating that priming of associative information reduces MTL activation. Third, re-encoding familiar associations in a well-established way had a minimal effect on both memory and MTL activation, indicating that MTL activation reflects storage of associations, not merely their initial representation.     

Modern to postmodern: Social construction,dissonance, and education

Modernist educational practice operates within an overarching norm of consonance, notions of sameness and agreement that permeate schools and classroom life. This paper posits a needed move to postmodern educational theory and practice through dissonance. Following an intellectual contextualization, two sets of philosophical claims are presented. The first promotes social construction of reality and the second poses dissonance rather than consonance. The paper concludes with a “look” at education from this postmodern perspective.     

The interaction of personality and job scope in predicting turnover

The interaction of employee personality characteristics and job scope in the prediction of turnover was studied. One hundred and nine individuals employed as machine operators (low-scope job) and scientific and technical personnel (high-scope job) within a large manufacturing organization were the sample. No direct relationships were found between personality characteristics and turnover for the combined sample of employees on high- and low-scope jobs. When correlational analyses were carried out within job scope samples it was evident that personality and job scope interacted in predicting turnover. For employees on high-scope jobs, turnover was negatively related to the need for achievement and positively related to the need for affiliation. Turnover was negatively related to the need for affiliation among employees on low-scope jobs. The implications of these findings for future research on turnover were discussed.