Effects of manual versus voice-activated dialing during simulated driving

We measured driving performance (lane-keeping errors, driving times, and glances away from the road scene) in a video driving simulator for 24 volunteers who each drove alone on a 10.6-km multicurved course while simultaneously placing calls on a mobile phone subscribed to a voice-activated dialing system. Driving performance also was measured for the same distance while participants manually dialed phone numbers and while they drove without dialing. There were 22% fewer lane-keeping errors (p<.01) and 56% fewer glances away from the road scene (p<.01) when they used voice-activated dialing as compared to manual dialing. Significantly longer driving times in both of the dialing conditions as compared to the No Dialing condition are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that drivers decrease driving speed to compensate for the demands of the secondary phone tasks.     

Measuring Judgments of Professionals: Using Vignettes in a Social Survey About Patient Confusion

The use of a factorial survey to measure the clinical judgments of professionals is described. This design allows the researcher to partial out the effects of variables on clinical decision making while using probability sampling. Methods frequently used to study judgments are reviewed and a study of nurses' judgments about patients' confusional episodes are used to illustrate the application of the factorial survey. Acute confusion in patients is a common clinical problem for nurses working in medical-surgical units in acute care hospitals. Using the factorial survey to study a real-life problem such as confusion demonstrates how this design can be used to test judgments in complex clinical situations, to aid in concept development, and to identify consensus among professionals.     

Learning the moves: the effect of familiarity and facial motion on person recognition across large changes in viewing format

Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion further by testing recognition with static profile images. Motion provided no benefit for recognition, indicating that structure-from-motion is an unlikely source of the motion advantage found in the first set of experiments.     

Recognizing moving faces: a psychological and neural synthesis

Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.     

“亚当·斯密问题”的逻辑张力

“亚当·斯密问题”是指斯密的《国富论》与《道德情操论》之间存在着对立或不一致的问题,最初由十九世纪中叶的德国历史学派所提出。此后,随着现实与理论的发展,出现了不同的看法。学者们普遍认为,斯密的两大著作之间、经济学与伦理学之间存在着对立或者不存在对立,而是相互一致的。这些看法都具有各自的积极合理的内容,但缺乏辩证的观点,而没有看到“斯密问题”自身的逻辑张力,也就是说,“斯密问题”所指涉的是现实的经济与伦理之间及作为其理论表现的经济学与伦理学之间的关系。“斯密问题”所含的这些关系呈现出了一个动态的、由肯定到否定再到否定之否定的辩证过程。     

THE NEED FOR POWER IN WOMEN WHO WERE SEXUALLY ABUSED AS CHILDREN An Exploratory Study

Ten women who had been sexually abused as children and a matched group of women who had not been sexually abused participated in a preliminary study to explore the hypothesis that feelings of powerlessness and a compensatory need for power continue into adulthood for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The Picture-Story Exercise (PSE) was used as an indirect assessment technique to determine the level of the need for power (McClelland, 1985; Winter, 1973, 1988). Results indicated that the stories of women with sexual abuse histories revealed a higher need for power and greater fear of power than those of nonabused women. Further content analysis of the PSE revealed that sexual abuse survivors' stories also contained more references to Finkelhor and Browne's (1986) dynamics of powerlessness, traumatic sexualization, betrayal, and stigmatization. These findings suggest important directions for future research as well as areas for therapeutic exploration.     

The impact of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli on attention in three domains

Whether task-irrelevant emotional stimuli facilitate or disrupt attention performance may depend on a range of factors, such as emotion type, task difficulty, and stimulus duration. Few studies, however, have systematically examined the influence of these factors on attention performance. Sixty-three adults, scoring within a normative range for mood and anxiety symptoms, completed either an easy or difficult version of an attention task measuring three aspects of attention performance: alerting, orienting, and executive attention. Results showed that in the easy task only, threatening versus nonthreatening task-irrelevant emotional faces facilitated orienting regardless of stimulus duration. These effects were no longer significant during the difficult condition. When the easy and difficult conditions were examined together, duration effects emerged such that stimuli of longer durations lead to greater interference, although effects were nonlinear. Findings illustrate that threat-relevant emotional stimuli facilitate attention during tasks with low cognitive load, but underscore the importance of considering a range of task parameters. Results are discussed in the context of adaptive and maladaptive emotion-attention interactions.     

A derived transfer of functions and the implicit association test

Participants were trained in a series of interrelated conditional discriminations that aimed to establish four 4-member equivalence classes (i.e., A1-B1-C1-D1, A2-B2-C2-D2, A3-B3-C3-D3, A4-B4-C4-D4). During this training, the four A stimuli (i.e., A1, A2, A3, and A4) were compounded with pictures containing positive or negative evaluative functions (A1/A2 negative & A3/A4 positive). The transfer of evaluative functions to directly and indirectly related members of the equivalence classes (i.e., B, C, and D stimuli) was measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT). During consistent test blocks, participants were required to press the same response key for target words that were related to those A stimuli that possessed similar evaluative functions (A1/A2-left key & A3/A4-right key). During inconsistent test blocks, target words that were related to those A stimuli with different evaluative functions were assigned to the same response key (A1/A4-left key & A2/A3-right key). Results showed that all 8 participants, who passed a matching-to-sample equivalence test following the IAT, responded more rapidly on consistent relative to inconsistent test blocks. This typical IAT effect was not observed for those participants who did not pass the equivalence test. The results suggest that the IAT effect may arise from formally untested derived relations, and supports the argument that such relations could provide a valid behavioral model of semantic categories in natural language.     

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point‐of‐view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants' responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer‐based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.