Professional Autonomy in Belgium

The Belgian health care system has a few features that may havecontributed to the rising costs of health care: patients' freechoice of physicians, large clinical freedom of physicians, essentiallya fee-for-service remuneration for medical specialists in which the feesare agreed between insurance funds and physicians. The increased medicalconsumption and costs have prompted the state and insurance companies totake measures that limit the professional autonomy of the physicians.Access to medical education, free until 1997, is now restricted. Themedical profession is organized in the Order of Physicians that hasestablished a code of professional ethics that has moral but not legalforce. So far, there is no special legislation for thepatient–physician relationship, though laws on specific issueslike organ transplantation contain duties for physicians. In recentyears a debate is taking place on patients' rights, of which informedconsent is central and gaining importance in medico-legal publications.An analysis of (ethical and legal) regulations concerning thewithholding or withdrawal of treatment by physicians demonstrate thatthe profession still enjoys a large clinical autonomy, though duediscussion with the patient has become more explicitly required. Therespect for professional autonomy is not primarily due to any formalpower that the Order of Physicians would have, but is rather grounded inthe generally high quality of the patient–physician relationshipthat in ethical terms is considered essentially as a confidencerelationship rather than a contractual relationship.     

A perceptual interference account of acquisition difficulties for non-native phonemes

This article presents an account of how early language experience can impede the acquisition of non-native phonemes during adulthood. The hypothesis is that early language experience alters relatively low-level perceptual processing, and that these changes interfere with the formation and adaptability of higher-level linguistic representations. Supporting data are presented from an experiment that tested the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese, German, and American adults. The underlying perceptual spaces for these phonemes were mapped using multidimensional scaling and compared to native-language categorization judgments. The results demonstrate that Japanese adults are most sensitive to an acoustic cue, F2, that is irrelevant to the English /r/-/l/ categorization. German adults, in contrast, have relatively high sensitivity to more critical acoustic cues. The results show how language-specific perceptual processing can alter the relative salience of within- and between-category acoustic variation, and thereby interfere with second language acquisition.     

Using Brunswikian theory and a longitudinal design to study how hierarchical teams adapt to increasing levels of time pressure

Brunswikian theory and a longitudinal design were used to study how three-person, hierarchical teams adapted to increasing levels of time pressure and, thereby, try to understand why previous team research has not necessarily found a direct relationship between team processes and performance with increasing time pressure. We obtained four principal findings. First, team members initially adapted to increasing time pressure without showing any performance decrements by accelerating their cognitive processing, increasing the amount of their implicit coordination by sending more information without being asked and, to a lesser extent, filtering (omitting) certain activities. Second, teams began and continued to perform the task differently with increasing time pressure, yet often achieved comparable levels of performance. Third, time pressure did affect performance because there was a level of time pressure beyond which performance could not be maintained, although that level differed for different teams. And, fourth, some adaptation strategies were more effective than others at the highest time pressure level. Taken together, these findings support the Brunswikian perspective that one should not necessarily expect a direct relationship between team processes and performance with increasing time pressure because teams adapt their processes in different, yet often equally effective ways, in an effort to maintain high and stable performance.     

Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words

Three experiments examined the involvement of newly learnt words in lexical competition. Adult participants were familiarized with novel nonsense sequences that overlapped strongly with existing words (e.g. cathedruke, derived from cathedral) through repeated presentation in a phoneme-monitoring task. Experiment 1 looked at the immediate effects of exposure to these sequences, with participants showing familiarity with the form of the novel sequences in a two-alternative forced choice task. The effect of this exposure on lexical competition was examined by presenting the existing words (e.g. cathedral) in a lexical decision task. The immediate effect of the exposure was facilitatory, suggesting that the novel words had activated the representation of the closest real word rather than developing their own lexical representations. In Experiment 2, inhibitory lexical competition effects emerged over the course of 5 days for offset-diverging (e.g. cathedruke-cathedral) but not onset-diverging (e.g. yothedral-cathedral) novel words. Experiment 3 disentangled the roles of time and level-of-exposure in the lexicalization process and assessed the generality of the observed lexical inhibition using pause detection. A single, concentrated exposure session was used, which resulted in good recognition performance soon after. Lexicalization effects were absent immediately after exposure but emerged 1 week later, despite no intervening exposure to the novel items. These results suggest that integrating a novel word into the mental lexicon can be an extended process: phonological information is learnt swiftly, but full integration with existing items develops at a slower rate.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in visual word recognition: evidence from expert vocabularies

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decision for late-acquired/high-frequency words (e.g. a psychologist responding to cognition) over late-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. a chemist responding to cognition), revealing a frequency effect when words are perfectly matched. However, contrary to theories that exclude AoA as a factor, performance was similar for the late-acquired/high-frequency and early-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. dragon) even though their cumulative frequencies differed by more than an order of magnitude. This last finding was replicated with geologists using geology words matched with early-acquired words in terms of concreteness (Experiment 2). Most interestingly, Experiment 3 yielded the same pattern of results in naming while controlling for imageability, a finding that is particularly problematic for parallel distributed processing models of reading.     

Categorical perception of speech stimuli in children at risk for reading difficulty

Children determined to be at risk (n = 24) or not at risk (n = 13) for reading difficulty listened to tokens from a voice onset time (VOT) (/ga/-/ka/) or tone series played in a continuous unbroken rhythm. Changes between tokens occurred at random intervals and children were asked to press a button as soon as they detected a change. For the VOT series, at-risk children were less sensitive than not-at-risk children to changes between tokens that crossed the phonetic boundary. Maps of group stimulus space produced using multidimensional scaling of reaction times for the VOT series indicated that at-risk children may attend less to the phonological information available in the speech stimuli and more to subtle acoustic differences between phonetically similar stimuli than not-at-risk children. Better phonological processing was associated with greater sensitivity to changes between VOT tokens that crossed the phonetic boundary and greater relative weighting of the phonological compared to the acoustic dimension across both groups.     

大学生职业决策自我效能测评的研究

本研究参照Betz和Taylor"职业生涯决策自我效能量表",依据对学生进行的访谈资料和学生开放式问卷调查结果,编制出"大学生职业决策自我效能量表".本研究抽取武汉地区14所大学30个专业1000名毕业年级的大学生作为研究样本,进行正式施测.统计分析结果表明(1)该量表的项目特性良好;(2)该量表都具有较好的内部一致性信度;(3)该量表均具有较强的辨别效度;(4)该量表作为整体判断使用较好.     

Do pigeons (Columba livia) perceive object unity?

Human infants perceive two rods moving in concert behind an occluder as one unitary rod. In four experiments we tested whether pigeons also perceive unity of objects. Pigeons were trained on a matching-to-sample task to discriminate between one unitary rod moving at a constant speed and two aligned rods moving together at the same speed. The latter stimulus was identical to the former except for a gap in the center. In experiment 1, we tested pigeons in probe trials in which a rectangle occluded the center of the sample rods, to see which comparison stimulus, the unitary rod or the aligned two rods, the subjects would match to the sample. Two of the three subjects pecked at the two rods significantly more often than at the unitary rod. In experiment 2, we trained the same pigeons to match the sample rods moving "in front of" the occluder. Pigeons persisted in matching two separate rods to the unitary rod moving in front of the occluder. In experiments 3 and 4, we used a parallelogram and an undulating shape as the occluder to alter the shape and the size of the portions above and below the occluder by the motion of the sample rods. Both subjects chose the two rods significantly more often than chance in experiment 3 and one of them did so in experiment 4. The results suggest that pigeons do not complete occluded portions even though the two elements move in concert. These negative results suggest that some alternative way of identifying objects may have evolved in pigeons. Accepted after revision: 2 May 2001 Electronic Publication