Preserved metamemorial ability in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease: shifting response bias

Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) display a greater tendency to endorse unstudied items as "old" on memory tests than healthy older adults. This liberal response bias may result in mistaken beliefs about the completion of common tasks. This research attempted to determine whether it was possible to shift the response bias of mild AD patients to be more conservative on a recognition memory test through behavioral intervention. Patients with mild AD and matched controls were evaluated with two almost identical paradigms, separated by about one week. For each session, 30 words were studied and 60 words (half studied, half novel) were shown at test. During one session participants were told that 30% of words were old, and at the other session that 70% were old. We found that both groups were able to shift their response bias between the two conditions. That patients with mild AD were able to successfully shift their response bias demonstrates that--despite their overall liberal response bias and poor memory relative to controls--one component of metamemorial ability is preserved in patients with mild AD.     

Disentangling perceptual and motor components in inhibition of return

Following an abrupt onset of a peripheral stimulus (a cue), the response to a visual target is faster when the target appears at the cued position than when it appears at other positions. However, if the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) is longer than approximately 300 ms, the response to the target is slower at the cued position than that at other positions. This phenomenon of a longer response time to cued targets is called "inhibition of return" (IOR). Previous hypotheses propose contributions of both response inhibition and attentional inhibition at cued position to IOR, and suggest that responding to the cue can eliminate the component of response inhibition. The current study uses tasks either executing or withholding response to the cue to investigate the relative contributions of response and attention components to IOR. A condition with bilateral display of the cue is also chosen as a control condition, and eight different SOAs between 1,000 and 2,750 ms are tested. Compared to the control condition, response delay to the target at a cued position is eliminated by responding to the cue, and a response advantage to the target at an uncued position is not affected by responding to the cue. Furthermore, both response delay at a cued position and response advantage at an uncued position decrease with SOA in the time window tested in these experiments. The results reported here indicate a dominant response inhibition at a cued position and a primary attentional allocation at an uncued position for IOR. Nonsignificant perceptual/attentional suppression at a cued position is argued to be a benefit for visual detection in a changing world.     

Testing boundary conditions for the conjunction fallacy: effects of response mode, conceptual focus, and problem type

Two experiments used within-subject designs to examine how conjunction errors depend on the use of (1) choice versus estimation tasks, (2) probability versus frequency language, and (3) conjunctions of two likely events versus conjunctions of likely and unlikely events. All problems included a three-option format verified to minimize misinterpretation of the base event. In both experiments, conjunction errors were reduced when likely events were conjoined. Conjunction errors were also reduced for estimations compared with choices, with this reduction greater for likely conjuncts, an interaction effect. Shifting conceptual focus from probabilities to frequencies did not affect conjunction error rates. Analyses of numerical estimates for a subset of the problems provided support for the use of three general models by participants for generating estimates. Strikingly, the order in which the two tasks were carried out did not affect the pattern of results, supporting the idea that the mode of responding strongly determines the mode of thinking about conjunctions and hence the occurrence of the conjunction fallacy. These findings were evaluated in terms of implications for rationality of human judgment and reasoning.     

Ethical and legal issues associated with using response-to-intervention to assess learning disabilities

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 allows schools to use a child's response to research-based intervention (RTI) as a part of procedures to identify students with learning disabilities. This paper considers whether RTI-based assessment models meet ethical and legal standards for acceptable assessment practices. Based on a review of available research, it was concluded that RTI-based assessment practices, when carefully crafted and implemented, have the potential to be multifaceted, fair, valid, and useful. Threats to acceptable RTI-based assessment practices include: the lack of research-based interventions appropriate for diverse academic domains, ethnic groups, grades K-12, and students with limited English proficiency; uncertainty regarding how to determine when nonresponse to intervention warrants formal referral for evaluation of special education eligibility; difficulty translating scientifically sound RTI practices to the local school level; and inadequate staff training and poor treatment fidelity. Suggested directions for future research are included.     

An examination of message-relevant affect in road safety messages: Should road safety advertisements aim to make us feel good or bad?

Drawing upon the multiple roles of affect posited by Elaboration Likelihood Model, the current paper examines the effectiveness of message-relevant affect. Specifically, humourous and fear-evoking anti-drink driving messages are examined in terms of perceptions of relative influence on self and others (i.e., the third-person effect) and their performance on a range of persuasion outcomes. The influence of involvement, response efficacy, and gender on persuasion outcomes is also examined. Participants (N = 201) viewed two advertisements and completed two questionnaires: the first, assessed pre-exposure attitudes and behaviour and immediate-post exposure attitudes and intentions; the second, 2–4 weeks later, assessed attitudes and behaviour. The results revealed, as predicted, interactions of the key variables and evidence of the greater persuasiveness of negative appeals immediately after exposure whilst greater improvement of positive appeals over time. The findings highlight the importance of continuing the exploration of positive appeals as a persuasive alternative to negative appeals.     

适应性测验的发展:历史与现状

适应性测验作为一种测验形式,与传统的纸笔测验形式相比,具有省时、高效等很多优越性。测验应该适合于被试的理念最初可见于比内的智力测验。上世纪七十年代以来,适应性测验的研究从经典测量理论阶段发展到项目反应理论阶段,经历了从二阶段、三阶段、多阶段测验、固定分支测验和分层适应性测验的发展,到现在的计算机化适应性测验研究。随着项目反应理论和计算机技术的发展,计算机化适应性测验已经在教育和心理测验领域中得到广泛应用。目前对它的研究日益深入,主要有项目克隆、项目曝光、多维适应性测验、被试诊断、人格适应性测验等问题。     

Individual differences in information order effects: The importance of right-hemisphere access in belief updating

The order in which information is received alters the evaluation of causal hypotheses. Specifically, research suggests that the last piece of information oftentimes has the greatest impact on the evaluation and that the difference in subjective value between two pieces of information is an important factor influencing the magnitude of this recency effect. The present paper extends this line of work by exploring individual differences in this phenomenon via one's degree of handedness. Two hundred and five participants were given two hypothetical scenarios and related causal hypotheses accompanied by two pieces of additional information and asked to revise their belief in each hypothesis as information accumulated. Results confirmed predictions that 1) inconsistent/mixed-handers (those who use their non-dominant hand for at least some activities) show a larger effect with two pieces of inconsistent weak or strong information, and 2) neither mixed-handers nor consistent/strong-handers (those who use their dominant hand for almost all activities) show an effect with strong and weak pieces of consistent information. Mixed-handers' susceptibility to persuasive arguments and Ramachandran’s (1995; Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998) belief-updating theory centered around communication between the two halves of the brain and functional access to the right hemisphere are used to account for these data.     

Audiovisual beat induction in complex auditory rhythms: Point-light figure movement as an effective visual beat

This study investigated whether explicit beat induction in the auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) modalities aided the perception of weakly metrical auditory rhythms, and whether it reinforced attentional entrainment to the beat of these rhythms. The visual beat-inducer was a periodically bouncing point-light figure, which aimed to examine whether an observed rhythmic human movement could induce a beat that would influence auditory rhythm perception. In two tasks, participants listened to three repetitions of an auditory rhythm that were preceded and accompanied by (1) an auditory beat, (2) a bouncing point-light figure, (3) a combination of (1) and (2) synchronously, or (4) a combination of (1) and (2), with the figure moving in anti-phase to the auditory beat. Participants reproduced the auditory rhythm subsequently (Experiment 1), or detected a possible temporal change in the third repetition (Experiment 2). While an explicit beat did not improve rhythm reproduction, possibly due to the syncopated rhythms when a beat was imposed, bimodal beat induction yielded greater sensitivity to a temporal deviant in on-beat than in off-beat positions. Moreover, the beat phase of the figure movement determined where on-beat accents were perceived during bimodal induction. Results are discussed with regard to constrained beat induction in complex auditory rhythms, visual modulation of auditory beat perception, and possible mechanisms underlying the preferred visual beat consisting of rhythmic human motions.     

Parallel averaging of size is possible but range-limited: A reply to Marchant,Simons, and De Fockert

In their recent paper, Marchant, Simons, and De Fockert (2013) claimed that the ability to average between multiple items of different sizes is limited by small samples of arbitrarily attended members of a set. This claim is based on a finding that observers are good at representing the average when an ensemble includes only two sizes distributed among all items (regular sets), but their performance gets worse when the number of sizes increases with the number of items (irregular sets). We argue that an important factor not considered by Marchant et al. (2013) is the range of size variation that was much bigger in their irregular sets. We manipulated this factor across our experiments and found almost the same efficiency of averaging for both regular and irregular sets when the range was stabilized. Moreover, highly regular sets consisting only of small and large items (two-peaks distributions) were averaged with greater error than sets with small, large, and intermediate items, suggesting a segmentation threshold determining whether all variable items are perceived as a single ensemble or distinct subsets. Our results demonstrate that averaging can actually be parallel but the visual system has some difficulties with it when some items differ too much from others.     

Practical Limitations in Making Decisions Regarding the Distribution of Applicant Personality Test Scores Based on Incumbent Data

For practitioners, the possibility of faking on personality tests has potential implications that are much broader than those captured by current theoretical debates over criterion-related validity, factor structure, or psychological processes. One unexplored potential impact of response distortion involves the pass rates associated with applying cutoff scores developed using a concurrent validation design to applicant samples. This practitioner-oriented paper compared applicant and incumbent scores on three personality dimensions and uncovered significant standardized group differences. These differences greatly influenced pass rates for three different selection models, which impacted expected utility of the selection system. Potential solutions for practitioners are provided, along with recommendations for future research in this area. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychologists in Orlando, Florida.