1,720,978 research outputs found
Cognitive limitations in aging and psychopathology: an introduction and a brief tutorial to research methods
No full textThe Mechanisms of the Temporal Release from Proactive Interference
No full textThe release from proactive interference (PI) is a well-studied phenomenon, but its cause is elusive. When a release in PI is caused by changes in the content of to-be-remembered items, the more accurate retrieval is likely a result of changes in context (Watkins & Watkins, 1975). However, changes in context do not readily explain the cause of PI release resulting from a temporal delay. Instead, it could be that during the delay subjects disengage from intrusive information from previous trials. The ability to disengage from no-longer-relevant information is related to fluid intelligence (Gf). I predicted that this ability to disengage, as defined by fluid intelligence, is the driving factor of the time-based release from PI. In order to test this prediction, I administered a free recall task to individuals of high and low Gf. The time between the last two lists was lengthened to cause release. The time manipulation did not cause a release from PI; essentially, this result represents a failure to replicate. Limitations of the study and potential methodological issues are discussed.Undergraduat
The role of attention control in mediating the relationship between Hick reaction time slopes and intelligence
No full textIn 1993, psychologists found that the Hick Task, a commonly used task to explore the relationship between speed of information processing (SOIP) and reaction times, may have results due to attentional breadth confounds (Bors et al., 1993). However, there were no studies that attempted to replicate this finding. In our study, we aimed to replicate the results of Bors et al. (1993) and expanded it by including attention measures. We recruited 44 participants from the Georgia Tech and Atlanta communities and asked them to complete cognitive tasks. We retained the attentional breadth confound in our “spread” condition but eliminated it with our “center” condition. We hypothesized that participants would have faster reaction times on the center condition, that reaction times in the center condition would correlate more strongly with attention and intelligence measures, and that attention measures would correlate to intelligence measures. A repeated-measures ANOVA found that there was a significant difference between reaction times on the 1-bit spread and 1-bit center conditions, but no such relationship between the 0-bit and 1-bit spread conditions. Additionally, the only significant correlation was between the two 1-bit reaction times. These findings were not what we expected, but give insight into future directions, including repeating the study with a more diverse sample, and exploring why there is an unexpected relationship between the 1-bit center and spread conditions.Undergraduat
Ruminating about depression and selective attention
No full textDepression is a debilitating mood disorder that has been linked to ruminative thinking. Clinical research has found connections between rumination, depression, and deficits in selective attention, especially for negative emotional material. However, results are inconsistent, especially regarding the role of ruminative thinking. In this context, rumination is usually operationalized as ineffective, intrusive, repetitive thinking about the symptoms, causes, and consequences of depression. However, Brinker and Dozois (2009) proposed that rumination forms a more general construct, independent of depression, but the relationship among this global rumination, depression, and selective attention has received little examination. The current study used a latent variables framework to analyze how emotional and non-emotional selective attention tasks relate to depressive symptoms, as measured by the CESD-R, and to both general rumination and rumination as a coping mechanism for depression. All forms of rumination formed a coherent construct, which could not be isolated from depressive symptoms as measured by the CESDR. Selective attention, regardless of item valence, was predictive of neither rumination nor depressive symptoms in the current study. Additionally, only non-emotional Stroop and the emotional and non-emotional Flanker tasks had acceptably high reliability, while the rest of the included selective attention tasks were quite unreliable.M.S
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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