Skilled Observation and Change Blindness: A Comparison of Law Enforcement and Student Samples

Some evidence suggests that expertise and observational skills training can reduce attentional errors, such as change blindness. Laypeople typically assume that law enforcement officers possess acute observational skills, but no research to date has compared law enforcement and lay samples on their susceptibility to change blindness. In the present study, student and law enforcement samples completed a change blindness task and attempted to identify the target(s) from four line‐ups. Law enforcement officers and students were equally susceptible to change blindness regarding the switch in the target's identity, but students were more likely than officers to detect changes in the target's clothing. Students also performed better on the line‐up task, overall, than officers. Additionally, whereas students' confidence was positively correlated with identification accuracy under some circumstances, officers' confidence was either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest some factors accounting for law enforcement officers' relatively poor performance on these tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Being controlled by normative influences: self-determination as a moderator of a normative feedback alcohol intervention.

The objectives of this research were to evaluate the efficacy of computer-delivered personalized normative feedback among heavy drinking college students and to evaluate controlled orientation as a moderator of intervention efficacy. Participants (N = 217) included primarily freshman and sophomore, heavy drinking students who were randomly assigned to receive or not to receive personalized normative feedback immediately following baseline assessment. Perceived norms, number of drinks per week, and alcohol-related problems were the main outcome measures. Controlled orientation was specified as a moderator. At 2-month follow-up, students who received normative feedback reported drinking fewer drinks per week than did students who did not receive feedback, and this reduction was mediated by changes in perceived norms. The intervention also reduced alcohol-related negative consequences among students who were higher in controlled orientation. These results provide further support for computer-delivered personalized normative feedback as an empirically supported brief intervention for heavy drinking college students, and they enhance the understanding of why and for whom normative feedback is effective.     

Time but not force is transferred between ipsilateral upper and lower limbs

The authors compared the force and time endpoint accuracy of goal-directed ipsilateral upper and lower limb isometric contractions and determined the components of motor performance that can be transferred from 1 limb to the other after practice. Ten young adults (27.4 +/- 4.4 years) performed 100 trials that involved their matching peak force to a force-time target with ankle dorsiflexor and elbow flexor muscles. The peak force error and variability was greater for ankle dorsiflexor contractions than for elbow flexor contractions, whereas the timing error and variability did not significantly vary with limb. There was transfer of timing, but not force, of motor output between upper and lower limbs. The timing error of the elbow flexor contractions decreased by 23% when those contractions were preceded by ankle dorsiflexor contractions, and the timing error of the ankle dorsiflexors decreased by 24% when those contractions were preceded by elbow flexor contractions. These finding therefore suggest that timing of an aiming isometric contraction may be organized at a common part of the brain for the upper and lower limbs.     

Teaching children with autism to request help with difficult tasks

We taught three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder to request help using an interrupted chain procedure during which we manipulated task materials such that the child was either incapable or capable of independently completing a link of a behavior chain. We initially observed undesirable generalization of requests for help during capable trials when teaching was introduced during incapable trials for two participants and to a lesser extent for the third participant. However, with repeated exposure to differential prompting and reinforcement across incapable and capable trials, differential responding was observed across EO‐present and EO‐absent trials for all three participants during both teaching sets and one generalization set that was never exposed to teaching procedures. These findings suggest that it is important to consider the antecedent conditions under which the response should occur when teaching children to request help.     

Predicting Parent-Child Aggression Risk in Mothers and Fathers: Role of Emotion Regulation and Frustration Tolerance

Efforts to identify targets that could be instrumental for child abuse prevention programs have often implicated stress as a key risk factor. However, existing research has not adequately considered the role of emotion dysregulation and frustration intolerance in predicting parents’ risk to engage in parent-child aggression (PCA). In addition, research in this field continues to focus heavily on mothers, with limited attention to fathers. Thus, the current study investigated whether perceived stress and distress, emotion dysregulation, and frustration intolerance independently predicted risk of PCA in a sample of 81 couples; moreover, the study evaluated whether emotion regulation or frustration tolerance mediated or moderated the association between stress and PCA risk. Findings indicated that each of the risk factors uniquely predicted PCA risk after controlling for demographic factors; neither emotion dysregulation nor frustration intolerance moderated the association between stress and PCA risk but emotion regulation did partially mediate this association. No significant differences in the pattern of these relationships were observed between mothers and fathers. Future research directions are discussed, including methodological considerations as well as evaluating how emotion regulation skills training and improved parental frustration tolerance may prevent parent-child aggression.