The effect of educational environment on identity recognition and perceptions of within-person variability

Individuals from small communities show impoverished face recognition relative to those from large communities, suggesting that the number of faces to which one is exposed has a measurable effect on face processing abilities. We sought to extend these findings by examining a second factor that influences the population of faces to which one is exposed during childhood: educational setting. In particular, we examined whether formerly home-schooled participants show reduced performance relative to non-homeschoolers on the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and on a sorting task in which participants sort photographs of two unfamiliar identities into piles representing the number of identities they believe are present. On the CFMT, there was no effect of educational setting. However, formerly home-schooled participants showed significant deficits on the sorting task. Such results suggest that reduced exposure to faces early in life as a function of home-schooling may have lasting effects on the face processing system.     

Speed-calming measures and their effect on driving speed – Test of a new technique measuring speeds based on GNSS data

Speeding increases the risk and severity of accidents, especially for vulnerable road users. Hence, minimisation of speeding in built-up areas is vital. Some countries widely use speed-calming measures (SCs). Documentation shows that SCs reduce speeding considerably although various types and designs of SCs affect this reduction. This paper includes studies of the effects from establishment of sinus speed humps of height 10 cm and length 950 cm and chicanes (with a free carriageway width of 5.30 cm and a length between the 0.5 m wide obstacles of 18 m) as a before/after study where the speed pattern after establishing SCs is compared with the one before. Floating Car Data used for analyses includes 3216 trips passing one/more SCs. The main results are that the effect from SCs decreases with the distance from the SCs and that a clear pattern is hard to establish above 75 m from the SC. Despite the apparent absence of more distant effects of each SC, there is an overall reduced average speed on the full length of a road with SCs. Humps reduce the mean speed comparable to the reduction from chicanes, but the speed variation is less reduced near chicanes, and especially prior to the arrival to such SC. Due to different traffic patterns around the two types of SCs, a direct comparison between the effects from humps and chicanes cannot be made. A tentative result at least for the two types of SCs studied is that the chicane results in a reduced effect on speed variation compared to the hump. The chicanes result in increased speed variation prior to the arrival to the SC compared to the humps. Hence, the indication is that chicanes might be less safe than humps due to speed variation although more research is needed especially concerning developing of best practice design for speed reducing devices and other speed-calming measures in built-up areas.     

The Effect of External and Internal Focus of Attention on Gait Variability in Older Adults

Internal focus of attention on a movement or focusing on an external target are both strategies that can affect motor performance. The authors explored whether manipulating subjects' focus of attention while walking would alter gait variability, a measure reflecting consistency of gait and associated with the risk of falling in older adults. Twenty community-living older adults participated in the study and were tested while focusing their attention on (a) gait consistency (internal focus) or (b) metronome beats (external focus). In both conditions gait variability increased (i.e., worsened p < .05) or did not change. No benefit was found in instructing subjects to focus on gait consistency or metronome beats. Such instructions may actually have distracted and interfered with the execution of gait.     

Everyday dynamics in generalized social and political trust

We applied the traits as density distributions of states approach to generalized expectations of trustworthiness, namely, social trust and trust in politicians. Using an experience sampling study (N = 47), we assessed state social trust and trust in politicians four times a day for 2 weeks. Within-person variability was found to be low but meaningful as it was predicted by variations in affect, interactional trust, and prior experiences. There was high stability in interindividual differences in the mean levels of state trustworthiness expectations and in the levels of within-person variability. Our study provides a comprehensive understanding of stability and variability in generalized expectations of trustworthiness and indicates broad applicability of the traits as density distributions of states approach.     

Virtual personalities: Using computational modeling to understand within-person variability

How can the same underlying psychological/neurobiological system result in both stable between-individual differences and high levels of within-individual variability in personality states over time and situations? We argue that both types of variability result from a psychological system based on structured, chronic motivations, where behavior at a specific point in time is a joint function of the current availability of motive affordances in the situation, current motivationally relevant bodily or interoceptive states, and the result of the competition among alternative active motives. Here we present a biologically-based theoretical framework, embodied in two different computational models, that shows how individuals with stable personality characteristics, can nevertheless exhibit considerable within-person variability in personality states across time and situations.     

The mindful eye: Smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements in meditators and non-meditators

BackgroundThis study examined the effects of cultivated (i.e. developed through training) and dispositional (trait) mindfulness on smooth pursuit (SPEM) and antisaccade (AS) tasks known to engage the fronto-parietal network implicated in attentional and motion detection processes, and the fronto-striatal network implicated in cognitive control, respectively.MethodsSixty healthy men (19–59 years), of whom 30 were experienced mindfulness practitioners and 30 meditation-naïve, underwent infrared oculographic assessment of SPEM and AS performance. Trait mindfulness was assessed using the self-report Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ).ResultsMeditators, relative to meditation-naïve individuals, made significantly fewer catch-up and anticipatory saccades during the SPEM task, and had significantly lower intra-individual variability in gain and spatial error during the AS task. No SPEM or AS measure correlated significantly with FFMQ scores in meditation-naïve individuals.ConclusionsCultivated, but not dispositional, mindfulness is associated with improved attention and sensorimotor control as indexed by SPEM and AS tasks.     

Capturing the interplay among within- and between-person processes using multilevel modeling techniques

Multilevel modeling is an excellent way to analyze nested or clustered data of the type commonly collected through investigations into the linkages between psychological functioning and relationship processes. This article describes two especially relevant applications of multilevel modeling. The first application, growth curve analysis, is already familiar to many researchers and involves modeling individuals’ change trajectories over time and relating the derived change parameters to person-level characteristics or phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize a second application, multilevel process analysis, which involves modeling within-subject characteristics other than change over a representation of time. Multilevel analysis of within-subject processes is particularly well-suited for hypotheses common to clinical psychology investigations, yet has received substantially less attention in the literature than its growth curve counterpart. Types of research questions and methodologies that can be addressed within the multilevel process analysis framework are described. Finally, aspects of multilevel process analysis are demonstrated with daily diary data collected from wives who reported on their marital happiness and depressed mood for 3 weeks.     

Phonetic variability and prosodic structure in mothers

Spontaneous speech acoustics are highly variable. Such variability may be problematic for infants relying on phonological form to solve the segmentation problem. In the present study, acoustic measures of vowel duration and a computer model of speech segmentation were used to evaluate the problem of phonetic variability for a rhythm-based speech segmentation strategy. The specific questions under study were (1) whether or not mothers realized disyllabic vowel duration patterns consistently in spontaneous infant-directed speech, and (2) whether or not these patterns were distinctive enough in the context of an utterance to provide a useful cue for speech segmentation. Data from four English-speaking mothers indicated that the trochaic-like duration pattern may interact with phrase-position and with grammatical category, but when the resulting patterns are consistent, they provide useful segmentation cues for spontaneous infant-directed speech.     

Flexible coping responses to severe acute respiratory syndrome-related and daily life stressful events

Based on the theoretical framework of coping flexibility, the present study examined the coping flexibility of university students in response to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-related and daily life stressful events. The Coping Flexibility Questionnaire was used to investigate 93 university students' coping responses toward 10 SARS-related stressful events and 10 daily life stressful events that generally occur among university students. Results showed that the patterns of coping flexibility were different for the two types of stressful events. The flexible and the active-inflexible patterns were most commonly found in coping with daily life stressful events. By contrast, the passive-inconsistent pattern was dominant when coping with daily life stressful events. Moreover, participants showed lower discriminating ability to situation controllability, and displayed poorer strategy-situation fit to cope with SARS-related events than with daily life stressful events. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.     

A phase transition model for the speed-accuracy trade-off in response time experiments

Most models of response time (RT) in elementary cognitive tasks implicitly assume that the speed-accuracy trade-off is continuous: When payoffs or instructions gradually increase the level of speed stress, people are assumed to gradually sacrifice response accuracy in exchange for gradual increases in response speed. This trade-off presumably operates over the entire range from accurate but slow responding to fast but chance-level responding (i.e., guessing). In this article, we challenge the assumption of continuity and propose a phase transition model for RTs and accuracy. Analogous to the fast guess model (Ollman, 1966), our model postulates two modes of processing: a guess mode and a stimulus-controlled mode. From catastrophe theory, we derive two important predictions that allow us to test our model against the fast guess model and against the popular class of sequential sampling models. The first prediction--hysteresis in the transitions between guessing and stimulus-controlled behavior--was confirmed in an experiment that gradually changed the reward for speed versus accuracy. The second prediction--bimodal RT distributions--was confirmed in an experiment that required participants to respond in a way that is intermediate between guessing and accurate responding.