Academic Guidance in Medical Student Research: How Well Do Supervisors and Students Understand the Ethics of Human Research?

Research is increasingly recognised as a key component of medical curricula, offering a range of benefits including development of skills in evidence-based medicine. The literature indicates that experienced academic supervision or mentoring is important in any research activity and positively influences research output. The aim of this project was to investigate the human research ethics experiences and knowledge of three groups: medical students, and university academic staff and clinicians eligible to supervise medical student research projects; at two Australian universities. Training in research ethics was low amongst academic staff and clinicians eligible to supervise medical student research. Only two-thirds of academic staff (67.9 %) and students (65.7 %) and less than half of clinicians surveyed (47.1 %; p?=?0.014) indicated that specific patient consent was required for a doctor to include patient medical records within a research publication. There was limited awareness of requirements for participant information and consent forms amongst all groups. In the case of clinical trials, fewer clinicians (88.4 %) and students (83.3 %) than academics (100 %) indicated there was a requirement to obtain consent (p?=?0.009). Awareness of the ethics committee focus on respect was low across all groups. This project has identified significant gaps in human research ethics understanding among medical students, and university academic staff and clinicians. The incorporation of research within medical curricula provides the impetus for medical schools and their institutions to ensure that academic staff and clinicians who are eligible and qualified to supervise students’ research projects are appropriately trained in human research ethics.     

Search strategies in decision making: the success of “success”

Examination of search strategies has tended to focus on choices determined by decision makers' personal preferences among relevant cues, and not on learning cue‐criterion relationships. We present an empirical and rational analysis of cue search for environments with objective criteria. In such environments, cues can be evaluated on the basis of three properties: validity (the probability that a cue identifies the correct choice if cue values differ between alternatives); discrimination rate (the proportion of occasions on which a cue has differing values); and success (the expected proportion of correct choices when only that cue can be used). Our experiments show that though there is a high degree of individual variability, success is a key determinant of search. Furthermore, a rational analysis demonstrates why success‐directed search is the most adaptive strategy in many circumstances. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Does the Development of Fresh Expressions of Church in the UK Tell Us about Mission Today?

This article explores the significance of the Fresh Expressions movement in the UK since the ground‐breaking Mission‐Shaped Church report was published by the Church of England in 2004. After reviewing the background to this report, the article explores some of the report's central themes and examines some of the more recent research on the movement's impact in the UK. It then highlights six ways in which fresh expressions continue to be significant as a missionary response in a post‐Christian context. These include the movement's theological underpinnings, its reassessment of key questions in ecclesiology, its commitment to local and contextual mission, and the emergence of a predominantly lay leadership. In recognizing that the movement is still in a state of evolution, the article concludes by suggesting some areas of continuing debate and challenge for the future.     

The effectiveness of feedback in multiple-cue probability learning

How effective are different types of feedback in helping us to learn multiple contingencies? This article attempts to resolve a paradox whereby, in comparison to simple outcome feedback, additional feedback either fails to enhance or is actually detrimental to performance in nonmetric multiple-cue probability learning (MCPL), while in contrast the majority of studies of metric MCPL reveal improvements at least with some forms of feedback. In three experiments we demonstrate that if feedback assists participants to infer cue polarity then it can in fact be effective in nonmetric MCPL. Participants appeared to use cue polarity information to adopt a linear judgement strategy, even though the environment was nonlinear. The results reconcile the paradoxical contrast between metric and nonmetric MCPL and support previous findings of people's tendency to assume linearity and additivity in probabilistic cue learning.     

An application of the matching law to social dynamics

Using a procedure similar to the one described by Conger and Killeen (1974), we evaluated levels of attending for 25 college students who participated in either a 20-min (n = 12) or 30-min (n = 13) discussion on juvenile delinquency. Confederates delivered statements of agreement (e.g., "I agree with that point") according to independent variable-interval schedules. Pooled results were evaluated using three generalized formulations of the matching law, and showed that matching was more likely during the first 5 min of the discussion than during the last 5 min. Individual data for 7 of 9 participants were better described by the generalized response-rate matching equation than by the generalized time-allocation matching equation when response allocation was characterized in terms of frequency rather than duration.     

Meta-analytic techniques reveal that corvid causal reasoning in the Aesop’s Fable paradigm is driven by trial-and-error learning

The classic Aesop’s fable, Crow and the Pitcher, has inspired a major line of research in comparative cognition. Over the past several years, five articles (over 32 experiments) have examined the ability of corvids (e.g., rooks, crows, and jays) to complete lab-based analogs of this fable, by requiring them to drop stones and other objects into tubes of water to retrieve a floating worm (Bird and Emery in Curr Biol 19:1–5, 2009b; Cheke et al. in Anim Cogn 14:441–455, 2011; Jelbert et al. in PLoS One 3:e92895, 2014; Logan et al. in PLoS One 7:e103049, 2014; Taylor et al. in Gray R D 12:e26887, 2011). These researchers have stressed the unique potential of this paradigm for understanding causal reasoning in corvids. Ghirlanda and Lind (Anim Behav 123:239–247, 2017) re-evaluated trial-level data from these studies and concluded that initial preferences for functional objects, combined with trial-and-error learning, may account for subjects’ performance on key variants of the paradigm. In the present paper, we use meta-analytic techniques to provide more precise information about the rate and mode of learning that occurs within and across tasks. Within tasks, subjects learned from successful (but not unsuccessful) actions, indicating that higher-order reasoning about phenomena such as mass, volume, and displacement is unlikely to be involved. Furthermore, subjects did not transfer information learned in one task to subsequent tasks, suggesting that corvids do not engage with these tasks as variants of the same problem (i.e., how to generate water displacement to retrieve a floating worm). Our methodological analysis and empirical findings raise the question: Can Aesop’s fable studies distinguish between trial-and-error learning and/or higher-order causal reasoning? We conclude they cannot.     

Cognitive bias,situationism, and virtue reliabilism

Synthese - Mark Alfano claims that the heuristics and biases literature supports inferential cognitive situationism, i.e., the view that most of our inferential beliefs are arrived at and retained...