Spatial updating of multiple targets: Comparison of younger and older adults

When walking without vision, people mentally keep track of the directions and distances of previously viewed objects, a process called spatial updating. The current experiment indicates that while people across a large age range are able to update multiple targets in memory without perceptual support, aging negatively affects accuracy, precision, and decision time. Participants (20 to 80 years of age) viewed one, three, or six targets (colored lights) on the floor of a dimly lit room. Then, without vision, they walked to a target designated by color, either directly or indirectly (via a forward turning point). The younger adults’ final stopping points were both accurate (near target) and precise (narrowly dispersed), but updating performance did degrade slightly with the number of targets. Older adults’ performance was consistently worse than the younger group, but the lack of interaction between age and memory load indicates that the effect of age on performance was not further exacerbated by a greater number of targets. The number of targets also significantly increased the latency required to turn toward the designated target for both age groups. Taken together, results extend previous work showing impressive updating performance by younger adults, with novel findings showing that older adults manifest small but consistent degradation of updating performance of multitarget arrays.     

THE PERCEIVED IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS ON WOMEN UNDERGRADUATES' PURSUIT OF SCIENCE

Using a survey of women science majors, we tested the assumption that women mentors and other women guides help women students pursue the sciences. The survey explicitly distinguished among three types of guides: mentors (who provide psychosocial support), sponsors (who provide instrumental support), and role models (who act as examples) encountered before and during college. We found that over 90% of the women had a guide of one type or another, that mentors were most influential to women's pursuit of science, and that guides during college were more influential than guides prior to college. Participants reported having more female than male guides overall, but that some of the most influential guides were men.     

Career engagement: bridging career counseling and employee engagement

A model of career engagement is presented to help bridge the gap between career counselors' focus on supporting individuals to find meaningful work and employers' desire for an engaged, productive, and committed workforce.     

a review of a quality of life approach to career development

Goeff S. Peruniak. (2010). A Quality of Life Approach to Career Development. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. 221 pages, $29.95 List, ISBN 978–1–4426–1064–4 (paperback).     

Detecting concealed information about person recognition

We examined a common, but understudied phenomenon: Assessing interviewees' truthfulness when they attempt to conceal their knowledge about another person. We argue that this should be mentally taxing because truthful answers are activated automatically, and hence, need to be suppressed when liars conceal their knowledge. Participants were shown three photographs of three females, only one of whom was known by the participants. The participants were asked questions about each female depicted in the photograph. Truth tellers were instructed to give the correct answers when discussing the female they know whereas liars were asked to conceal their knowledge about this female. Independent observer ratings revealed that liars appeared to be thinking the hardest when discussing the female they know, whereas truth tellers appeared to be thinking the hardest when discussing the females they did not know. Truth tellers looked the most at the photographs of the unknown females, whereas liars' gaze did not differ across photographs. Finally, liars' answers about the female they know contained substantial truthful elements. In summary, truth tellers' and liars' responses differed substantially and those different responses are valuable cues to detect deceit. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Age-related susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer and the horizontal-vertical illusions

Participants between the ages of 3 and 20 years adjusted the Müller-Lyer illusion and the inverted-T form of the Horizontal-Vertical illusion. Perceptual error was quantified using signal detection and nonparametric measures of sensitivity and responsivity. Significant changes in sensitivity and responsivity were found for each illusion across participants' ages. No effect of sex of participant was found. Sensitivity and responsivity were largely asymptotic between the ages of 13 to 15 years for the Müller-Lyer illusion and between the ages of 11 to 15 years for the Horizontal-Vertical illusion.     

The absent professor: why we don't teach research ethics and what to do about it

Research ethics education in the biosciences has not historically been a priority for research universities despite the fact that funding agencies, government regulators, and the parties involved in the research enterprise agree that it ought to be. The confluence of a number of factors, including scrutiny and regulation due to increased public awareness of the impact of basic research on society, increased public and private funding, increased diversity and collaboration among researchers, the impressive success and speed of research advances, and high-profile cases of misconduct, have made it necessary to reexamine how the bioscience research community at all levels provides ethics education to its own. We discuss the need to and reasons for making ethics integral to the education of bioscientists, approaches to achieving this goal, challenges this goal presents, and responses to those challenges.     

Representing spatial location and layout from sparse kinesthetic contacts

Participants' fingers were guided to 2 locations on a table for 3 s, then back to the start. They reported distances and angles between the locations by (a) replacing 1 or 2 fingers, (b) translating the contacted configuration, or (c) estimating distance or angle alone. Distance error increased across these conditions. Angular error increased when the angular reference axis was rotated before the response. Replacing 1 finger was impaired by a change in posture from exposure to test. The results suggest a kinesthetic representation is used to replace the fingers, but to estimate distance and angle at new locations, a configural representation is computed. This presentation is oriented within an extrinsic reference frame and maintains shape more accurately than scale.     

Neuropsychological screening for cognitive impairment using computer-assisted tasks

The aim of this study was to validate a computer-assisted screening battery for classifying patients into two groups, those with and without cognitive impairment. Participants were all patients referred to the neuropsychology clinics at four VA medical centers during a 1-year period. Patients meeting the study inclusionary criteria (N = 252) were administered the Neurobehavioral Evaluation System-3 (NES3) computer-assisted battery. A detailed neuropsychological examination was carried out by an experienced neuropsychologist, who diagnosed the patient as cognitively impaired or not impaired. The neuropsychologist's diagnosis was the gold standard. Recursive partitioning analyses yielded several classification procedures using the NES3 data to predict the gold standard These procedures produced a set of six NES3 tasks that provide good sensitivity and specificity in predicting di- agnosis. Sensitivity and specificity for the least random classification procedure were 0.87 and 0.67, respectively. The results suggest that computer-assisted screening methods are a promising means of triaging patients.     

Cognitive strategy and ability in endurance activities

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether elite athletes utilize associative strategies and, on the other hand, if nonelite athletes prefer to use dissociative strategies. 60 athletes were interviewed and the Schomer's 1986 method of measurement was used to measure association and dissociation. Analysis showed no significant differences in the total associative and dissociative scores among the three different abilities. However, a significant difference was found concerning the use of dissociative strategy between men and women.