Surgical patents and patients — The ethical dilemmas

It is obvious that every inventor should be rewarded for the intellectual effort, and at the same time be encouraged to successively improve his or her discovery and to work on subsequent innovations. Patents also ensure that patent owners are officially protected against intellectual piracy, but protection of intellectual property may be difficult to accomplish. Nevertheless, it all comes down to this basic question: Does a contradiction exist between medical ethics and the “Medical and Surgical Procedure Patents” system? It may well turn out that medical-procedure patents can have a negative influence on the standard of medical care. Medical-method patents may also interfere with the physician-patient relationship. At present, physicians do not question the usefulness of patent protection for medicines, biotechnology, equipment and devices, but they strongly oppose it for surgical procedures.     

Constant latent odds-ratios models and the mantel-haenszel null hypothesis

In the present paper, a new family of item response theory (IRT) models for dichotomous item scores is proposed. Two basic assumptions define the most general model of this family. The first assumption is local independence of the item scores given a unidimensional latent trait. The second assumption is that the odds-ratios for all item-pairs are constant functions of the latent trait. Since the latter assumption is characteristic of the whole family, the models are called constant latent odds-ratios (CLORs) models. One nonparametric special case and three parametric special cases of the general CLORs model are shown to be generalizations of the one-parameter logistic Rasch model. For all CLORs models, the total score (the unweighted sum of the item scores) is shown to be a sufficient statistic for the latent trait. In addition, conditions under the general CLORs model are studied for the investigation of differential item functioning (DIF) by means of the Mantel-Haenszel procedure. This research was supported by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant number 400-20-026.     

Coping with the stress of a painful medical procedure

To evaluate its effect on procedure-related distress, the focus of attention was manipulated by providing training to hospitalized acute burn patients (n=42). Participants were randomly assigned to attention focusing (i.e. attending to procedural sensations) or music distraction (i.e. attention diverting) coping interventions, or to usual care during the target dressing change. Coping behavior (i.e. distraction, focusing, and three confounding methods, ignoring, catastrophizing, reinterpreting), tension and intrusiveness were evaluated 24 h retrospectively (i.e. for the prior procedure), during the targeted procedure, and 30 min after the target procedure. When coping during the target procedure by ignoring, reinterpreting, and catastrophizing were covaried, the music distraction group experienced significantly fewer intrusions, and the attention focus group had more intrusions. Additionally, secondary analyses revealed that coping by ignoring during the prior day's procedure significantly predicted higher procedural tension during, and more intrusions following, the targeted procedure. Suppression-based forms of emotion-focused coping may be enhanced by training in the use of an explicit distractor.     

Disruption of temporally organized behavior by morphine

Four pigeons pecked keys in two different procedures commonly used in the study of timing, or temporal discrimination. Sessions consisted of 40 trials. During half of the trials, two keys were presented for 50 s. Left-key pecks were reinforced according to a variable-interval 67.86-s schedule during the first 25 s of the trial, and right-key pecks were not reinforced. During the second 25 s of the trial, right-key pecks were reinforced according to the same schedule, and left-key pecks were not reinforced. In the other half of the 40-trial session, the center key was presented. The majority of these trials arranged fixed-interval 2.5-s schedules. Occasionally a probe, or peak-interval, trial was presented. These trials were 100 s in duration and terminated without reinforcement. These two procedures were used to examine the effects of morphine on indexes of timing and on patterns of responding. Morphine altered behavior in a race-dependent manner in both procedures. Low baseline (saline) response rates were increased following morphine administration, and high baseline rates were either unaffected or decreased slightly. Rate-dependent effects appeared as leftward shifts in the timing index for two-key trials and decreases in the index of curvature for fixed-interval trials. Despite large changes in response rates, no consistent shift of the peak time was observed during peak-interval trials. These results are discussed primarily in terms of rate dependency; that is, rates of responding following drug administration tend to be determined in large part by rates of responding under baseline conditions.     

Young children produce categorical false recall without activation of the lure items

Individuals who study a list of words that are all related to another word that is not presented (a lure word) sometimes produce a false memory of having studied the lure word. The false memories are observed in lists of words that are in the same category as (category list) or associated with (associative list) a word that was not presented in an attempt to elicit false recall. The present study investigated whether young children create these types of false recall. Following the study of a categorical list, false recall was elicited in young children to the same degree as in adults, but studying an associative list elicited false recall only in adults. Furthermore, categorically related lure words did not have a priming effect in young children. These results suggest that the categorical false recall is produced via a different mechanism from the associative false recall.     

Should we rely on the Kenward–Roger approximation when using linear mixed models if the groups have different distributions?

The study explores the robustness to violations of normality and sphericity of linear mixed models when they are used with the Kenward–Roger procedure (KR) in split‐plot designs in which the groups have different distributions and sample sizes are small. The focus is on examining the effect of skewness and kurtosis. To this end, a Monte Carlo simulation study was carried out, involving a split‐plot design with three levels of the between‐subjects grouping factor and four levels of the within‐subjects factor. The results show that: (1) the violation of the sphericity assumption did not affect KR robustness when the assumption of normality was not fulfilled; (2) the robustness of the KR procedure decreased as skewness in the distributions increased, there being no strong effect of kurtosis; and (3) the type of pairing between kurtosis and group size was shown to be a relevant variable to consider when using this procedure, especially when pairing is positive (i.e., when the largest group is associated with the largest value of the kurtosis coefficient and the smallest group with its smallest value). The KR procedure can be a good option for analysing repeated‐measures data when the groups have different distributions, provided the total sample sizes are 45 or larger and the data are not highly or extremely skewed.     

Recollection training and transfer effects in Alzheimer's disease: effectiveness of the repetition-lag procedure

Objective

This study was designed to extend the use of a memory training technique, known as the repetition-lag procedure, to Alzheimer patients. The specificity of this procedure is to target the process of recollection for improvement.

Method

A group of 12 patients were trained individually for 6 h. The training procedure consisted of a series of yes/no recognition tasks in which some words were repeated throughout the test list across gradually increasing delays. Their performance was evaluated on pre-and-post tests and compared with a recognition practice group and a no contact control group.

Results

Initially, recollection training patients only performed accurately when the delay between repetitions consisted of one intervening word, but by the end of training their performance increased up to four-word intervals. Interestingly, these benefits generalized to other measures of memory, such as working memory, visual memory and source recognition.

Conclusions

Effectiveness of the repetition-lag procedure in Alzheimer’s disease is discussed.     

Operant Variability: A Conceptual Analysis

Some researchers claim that variability is an operant dimension of behavior. The present paper reviews the concept of operant behavior and emphasizes that differentiation is the behavioral process that demonstrates an operant relation. Differentiation is conceived as change in the overlap between two probability distributions: the distribution of reinforcement probability as a function of some response property (S distribution) and the probability distribution of the response property itself (R distribution). This concept implies that the differentiation process can be measured only if S distribution and R distribution are both established on the same response property. To determine whether the differentially reinforced behavioral variability fits the proposed concept of operant behavior, I examine the main procedures (lag n and threshold procedures) and the main dependent variable (U value) employed in the studies of operant variability. Because lag n and threshold procedures establish their S distributions on properties distinct from U value, differentiation cannot be measured over the change in U value. I conclude that studies of operant variability have failed to provide a direct demonstration that variability is an operant dimension of behavior. Hence, studies in which measures of variability provide a basis to measure differentiation can better support the claim that variability is an operant dimension of behavior.     

内隐学习研究的核心方法——人工语法范式

本文是对近三十年来内隐学习的核心研究方法--人工语法范式--的一个总结.文章分三个部分,分别介绍了人工语法范式的三个要素.第一部分介绍了学习材料要素,即限定状态语法和双条件语法.第二部分介绍了指导语要素,着重讲解了它的实验性分离功能.第三部分介绍了程序要素,伴随内隐学习研究问题的深入和复杂化趋势,循序演绎了研究者对人工语法范式程序所做的调整.