1,720,964 research outputs found

    Reducing errors of eyewitness identifications

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    Throughout the thesis, the issue of whether eyewitness decision strategy (relative or absolute) is indicative of accuracy was examined. Results were mixed but where an effect emerged (studies 1, 2a & 2b), the data suggested that eyewitnesses were more likely to be accurate when using an absolute decision strategy. The likelihood of using such a strategy was maximised when lineup members were viewed under a sequential presentation rather than a simultaneous presentation. In this respect, the sequential lineup was recommended over the more usual simultaneous lineup.The effect of lineup member similarity on accuracy and decision strategy usage was also examined through the manipulation of lineup construction methods (similarity-to-suspect; match-to-description). Results indicated that neither construction method significantly influenced accuracy or decision strategy usage.The thesis also examined the influence of an emergent factor - facial distinctiveness - with the expectation that a distinctive target would be easier to identify from a line-up because of (i) a more resilient memory trace, (ii) a representation which elicits less confusion with similar faces, or (iii) a more heterogeneous set of foils as a match to the distinctive target face. In a series of experiments (studies 2a, 2b, & 3) in which target presence, lineup construction, and lineup presentation type (simultaneous; sequential) were manipulated, distinctiveness failed to influence eyewitness performance. A partial replication of experiments of 2a and 2b in which delay was shortened also failed to find the expected distinctiveness advantage (study 4). The lack of a distinctiveness advantage was unlikely to be due to the particular targets used as a traditional laboratory-based old/new task yielded the expected advantage when recognising distinctive faces over typical faces in general, and the distinctive target over the typical target in particular (study 5)

    Measuring manual dexterity and anxiety in divers using a novel task at 35-41 m

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    Background: nitrogen narcosis has a detrimental impact on the manual dexterity of divers and prior research has suggested that this impairment may be magnified by anxiety. Preliminary findings of the effects of depth (i.e., narcosis) and subjective anxiety on a novel test of manual dexterity are presented. Methods: there were 45 subjects who were given a test of manual dexterity once in shallow water (1–10 m/3–33 ft) and once in deep water (35–41 m/115–135 ft). Subjective anxiety was concurrently measured in 33 subjects who were split into ‘non-anxious’ and ‘anxious’ groups for each depth condition. Results: subjects took significantly longer (seconds) to complete the manual dexterity task in the deep (mean 5 52.8; SD 5 12.1) water compared to the shallow water (mean 5 46.9; SD 5 8.4). In addition, anxious subjects took significantly longer to complete the task in the deep water (mean 5 48.6; SD 5 6.8) compared to non-anxious subjects (mean 5 53.2; SD 5 9.9), but this was not the case in the shallow water. Discussion: this selective effect of anxiety in deep water was taken as evidence that anxiety may magnify narcotic impairments underwater. It was concluded that the test of manual dexterity was sensitive to the effects of depth and will be a useful tool in future research

    Memory and metacognition in dangerous situations: investigating cognitive impairment from gas narcosis in undersea divers

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    Objective: The current study tested whether undersea divers are able to accurately judge their level of memory impairment from inert gas narcosis.Background: Inert gas narcosis causes a number of cognitive impairments, including a decrement in memory ability. Undersea divers may be unable to accurately judge their level of impairment, affecting safety and work performance.Method: In two underwater field experiments, performance decrements on tests of memory at 33 to 42 m were compared with self-ratings of impairment and resolution. The effect of depth (shallow [1-11 m] vs. deep [33-42 m]) was measured on free-recall (Experiment 1; n = 41) and cued-recall (Experiment 2; n = 39) performance, a visual-analogue self-assessment rating of narcotic impairment, and the accuracy of judgements-of-learning (JOLs).Results: Both free- and cued-recall were significantly reduced in deep, compared to shallow, conditions. This decrement was accompanied by an increase in self-assessed impairment. In contrast, resolution (based on JOLs) remained unaffected by depth. The dissociation of memory accuracy and resolution, coupled with a shift in a self-assessment of impairment, indicated that divers were able to accurately judge their decrease in memory performance at depth.Conclusion: These findings suggest that impaired self-assessment and resolution may not actually be a symptom of narcosis in the depth range of 33 to 42 m underwater and that the divers in this study were better equipped to manage narcosis than prior literature suggested. The results are discussed in relation to implications for diver safety and work performance

    The effect of informing liars about Criteria-Based Content Analysis on their ability to deceive CBCA-raters

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    As soon as liars realize that evaluators use CBCA to assess the credibility of their statements, it is possible that liars will gain knowledge of CBCA and try to 'improve' their statements in order to make an honest impression on CBCA-judges. The present experiment investigated to what extent liars are capable of doing this. In all, 45 participants were randomly allocated to one of the following three conditions: a truth telling condition in which participants were asked to recall a videotaped event which they had just seen; an uninformed deception condition in which participants who had only been given guidelines about the content of the videotaped event were asked to recall the event as though they had seen the videotape; and an informed deception condition in which participants received information about CBCA before they were asked to pretend that they had seen the videotape. CBCA-raters scored the accounts and a comparison was made between the total CBCA-scores of the three conditions. The study also examined the extent to which CBCA-assessments could correctly classify truthful and deceptive accounts, first by means of a discriminant analysis (with the total CBCA-score as dependent variable) and secondly by asking a British CBCA-expert to judge the veracity of the statements. The results indicated that liars are capable of influencing CBCA-assessments. First, the CBCA-scores of liars who were informed about CBCA were similar to the CBCA-scores of truth tellers and significantly higher than the CBCA-scores of liars who were not informed about CBCA. Secondly, the objective status of the participant (truth teller vs. informed liar) could not be successfully predicted in a discriminant analysis on the basis of total CBCA-scores. Thirdly, statements of the majority of informed liars were assessed as truthful by a British CBCA-exper

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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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