Categorical Choices Research Articles

What guides the judgment of learning: Memory or heuristics? An event-related potential study

Memory monitoring ability is essential for the effectiveness of learning processes. Judgment of Learning (JOL), a metacognitive judgment, is commonly used to measure this ability. An ongoing debate questions whether JOL is an outcome of an inferential or recollective experience, as suggested by different hypotheses regarding the underlying cognitive mechanisms of this judgment. To address this question through a neuroscientific perspective, we aimed to investigate the temporal dynamic of JOL adopting event-related potential (ERP) methodology. Seventy-two young adults participated in an episodic memory task involving word-pairs as stimuli. Their JOLs were obtained through categorical choices in a delayed condition. Additionally, their memory performance was tested in the recognition phase. ERP components were compared for different JOL levels, as well as for the hit responses in the recognition test according to their JOL levels. The analyses showed that JOL processes are observable within an early time window after stimulus presentation, as evidenced by elicitation of the P100, N100, P200, N200, and P300 components across all JOL levels. However, only the amplitude of the N100 varied among these levels. A negative ERP component with 330–500 ms latency was also evident for all JOL levels in the central and parietal electrodes, which did not differ in amplitude. The analyses of the recognition phase ERPs showed that the hit responses did not exhibit a significant difference in the familiarity-related mid-frontal old/new effect (FN400) amplitude; however, those with high level of JOL elicited recollection-related parietal old-new effect with a smaller amplitude. These findings support both hypotheses suggesting that JOL is influenced by heuristics and the retrievability of information.

The effect of care team-patient relationship on decision-making in relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.

e19530 Background: Understanding patient involvement in shared decision making is critical for informed decision-making for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM) patients. This study explored the relationships between care teams and patients, who patients talk to and quantify the level of involvement, satisfaction, and comfort in the process of reaching a final change in treatment decision. Methods: HealthTree Cure Hub (PMID: 35271305) was used to conduct a survey for RRMM patients for their first change of therapy decision. Five-point Likert scales were used (1-Not at All Influential to 5-Extremely Influential; 1-Very Satisfied to 5-Very Dissatisfied), along with dichotomous and categorical choices. Results: 294 patients with RRMM were included with a mean age of 66±9, 53% were female, and 49% had graduate level education. Of 219 demographics respondents, 91% were white. Of the people patients talked to, the most influential individuals ranked by somewhat to extremely influential were: 1) myeloma specialist (84%), 2) community hematologist/oncologist (69%), and 3) spouse, partner or significant other (56%). Additionally, 67% of patients talked with nurses, PAs, or RNAs, with 49% finding them somewhat to extremely influential. Seeking a second opinion from a myeloma specialist was reported by 34% of patients and 50% of patients reported talking to other patients about treatment decisions. Patients varied in their description of their relationship/communication approach with their doctor: the doctor makes recommendations, the patients ask questions and they discuss preferences, then 1) patient proposes ideas and the decision is made together (37%), 2) then the patient makes the final decisions (21%) and 3) then the patient follows the doctor’s suggestions (14%). Importantly, a weak positive relationship existed between these levels of patient involvement in the treatment decisions and their involvement-satisfaction in choosing a treatment (r = 0.251, p < 0.001). About half of patients (51%) followed their care team recommendations without changes, while 31% opted for significant alterations, and 19% chose a modified option. Most patients reported making the final decision (59%), followed by their doctor (40%), and the minority reported a caregiver or partner (1%). Conclusions: This study identified that about half of patients engage in a collaborative and active decision-making process, which was related to their involvement-satisfaction of the treatment decision. Patients actively engaged with various individuals, including myeloma specialists, community hematologists/oncologists, and spouse/partners. Notably, discussions with nurses, PAs, and RNAs played a significant role, along with interactions with peers. Taken together a multifaceted engagement highlights the active role of patients in determining their treatment paths within a complex healthcare network.

Patient, parent and carer perspectives surrounding expedited paediatric epilepsy surgery

ObjectiveMost paediatric epilepsies with MRI visible lesions do not respond to antiseizure pharmacotherapy. Such medication resistance, which often takes years to become formally defined, is commonly required for surgical candidacy. Expedited surgical referral at lesional epilepsy diagnosis may result in better seizure, cognitive and developmental prognoses. This study explored the views of patients, parents and carers regarding epilepsy surgery, treatment priorities, and participation in a proposed expedited surgery trial. Methods205 patients, parents and carers (61% UK-based, 26% North American) responded to electronic surveys from February to May 2022. Participants were recruited through social media sites, epilepsy charities and societies. Categorical choice and free-text questions were used to investigate participant perspectives, and Pearson’s chi-squared test was utilised to detect meaningful differences amongst respondent subgroups. ResultsAlmost 90% of respondents who had experienced epilepsy surgery (either themselves or their child) reported seizure cessation or reduction. Postoperative outcome measures prioritised most frequently were seizure freedom (66%), quality of life (47%), seizure severity (30%), seizure frequency (28%) and independence (27%). Most participants support expedited surgery in suitable patients (65%), with just over half (51%) willing to participate in the proposed trial. Many participants (37%) were undecided, often due to fears surrounding neurosurgery. Subgroup perspectives were broadly similar, with more parents and caregivers favouring expedited surgery compared to patients (p = .016) and more UK-based participants willing to take part in an expedited surgery trial compared to those from North America (p = .01). ConclusionsPatients, parents and carers are open to considering expedited surgery for lesional epilepsies and would support a trial exploring this approach. Priorities from treatment were largely similar between participant subgroups, with seizure, quality of life and neuropsychological outcomes ranked highly. Accounting for these preferences will facilitate the delivery of a trial that is patient- and caregiver-focused, enhancing feasibility, satisfaction and benefit for prospective participants.

Subject Alternation and Antecedent Preference in Romanian

In this paper, we will study the use of null pronouns on the one hand and the interpretation of null and pronominal subjects on the other hand in Romanian. While both questions have been studied across a wide range of Romance languages, empirical data on Romanian are still missing in the literature. Our first three experiments, using a binary choice of possible answers to questions, show that null subjects are generally preferred in Romanian. This preference is, however, modified by the contrast effect with more pronominal subjects when there is an alternative explicit or presupposed referent in the context. In our fourth experiment, we find that, as in other Romance languages, null subjects prefer a subject antecedent while pronominal subjects prefer a non-subject antecedent, showing the typical division of labour effect. The preference for null subjects in our experiment is slightly smaller than in Italian or European Portuguese, two languages that show a stronger division of labour effect with near categorical choices of subject and object antecedents for null and pronominal subjects, respectively. Preferences found for Romanian resemble those found for Spanish. We argue that the frequency of null subjects in a language may play a role in the strength of the division of labour effect.

Encoding of continuous perceptual choices in human early visual cortex.

Research on the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making has typically focused on simple categorical choices, say between two alternative motion directions. Studies on such discrete alternatives have often suggested that choices are encoded either in a motor-based or in an abstract, categorical format in regions beyond sensory cortex. In this study, we used motion stimuli that could vary anywhere between 0° and 360° to assess how the brain encodes choices for features that span the full sensory continuum. We employed a combination of neuroimaging and encoding models based on Gaussian process regression to assess how either stimuli or choices were encoded in brain responses. We found that single-voxel tuning patterns could be used to reconstruct the trial-by-trial physical direction of motion as well as the participants' continuous choices. Importantly, these continuous choice signals were primarily observed in early visual areas. The tuning properties in this region generalized between choice encoding and stimulus encoding, even for reports that reflected pure guessing. We found only little information related to the decision outcome in regions beyond visual cortex, such as parietal cortex, possibly because our task did not involve differential motor preparation. This could suggest that decisions for continuous stimuli take can place already in sensory brain regions, potentially using similar mechanisms to the sensory recruitment in visual working memory.

Deicticthisand speaker containment

This article examines a hitherto unnoticed set of deictic uses of the English proximal demonstrativethis, namely those where the speaker is contained in the referent of the demonstrative NP. The usual case, where the speaker is not contained in the referent, has been extensively studied and the choice between proximal and distal has been argued to be based on a combination of physical (proximity of the referent to the speaker) and psychological/subjective factors. The present article focuses on those cases where the speaker is contained in the referent, arguing that this leads to a categorical choice in deictic uses, with only proximalthisbeing possible. The article further shows that there are four relevant types of containment. First, spatial containment, where the speaker is physically located in the referent (e.g.this room); second, situational containment, where the referent is an event or state and the speaker is a participant in it (e.g.this conversation); third, set containment, where the referent is a group of people of which the speaker is a member (e.g.in this family); and fourth, temporal containment, where the speaker (or more precisely the time of utterance) is contained in the referent (e.g.this week).

The Local Online Media Professionalism Over Candidate Framing Inside Pacitan Election 2020

The Pacitan Local Leaders Election (Pilkada Pacitan) 2020 must both run democratically and prioritize the citizens’ health in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides, Pacitan local online media are firstly allowed under regulations (PKPU No 13, 2020) to achieve the success of the elections. From this first-time involvement, the local online media are dealt with various interests trying to attract journalists or online media to stand with one or the other candidate pairs. To meet the purpose, the researchers employed qualitative research methods using framing analysis. In this case, Edelman framing analysis, with categorization choice by highlighting and eliminating other aspects, aims at building an opinion. In conformity with the results, the local online media are not neutral. Further, the news text framing of the online media professionalism in reporting the Pacitan Pilkada was as follows: 1) political culture in Pacitan, 2) ethical competence, 3) legal competence, 4) knowledge competence. Those competencies must be possessed by a journalist. Even more, they were carrying out political activities such as the 2020 Pilkada. The professionalism of journalists was necessarily needed, especially in Indonesia’s democratic party implementation to elect legislative and executive leaders who were truly coming from the people’s soul.

Flexible integration of continuous sensory evidence in perceptual estimation tasks

Temporal accumulation of evidence is crucial for making accurate judgments based on noisy or ambiguous sensory input. The integration process leading to categorical decisions is thought to rely on competition between neural populations, each encoding a discrete categorical choice. How recurrent neural circuits integrate evidence for continuous perceptual judgments is unknown. Here, we show that a continuous bump attractor network can integrate a circular feature, such as stimulus direction, nearly optimally. As required by optimal integration, the population activity of the network unfolds on a two-dimensional manifold, in which the position of the network's activity bump tracks the stimulus average, and, simultaneously, the bump amplitude tracks stimulus uncertainty. Moreover, the temporal weighting of sensory evidence by the network depends on the relative strength of the stimulus compared to the internally generated bump dynamics, yielding either early (primacy), uniform, or late (recency) weighting. The model can flexibly switch between these regimes by changing a single control parameter, the global excitatory drive. We show that this mechanism can quantitatively explain individual temporal weighting profiles of human observers, and we validate the model prediction that temporal weighting impacts reaction times. Our findings point to continuous attractor dynamics as a plausible neural mechanism underlying stimulus integration in perceptual estimation tasks.

An outer approximation bi-level framework for mixed categorical structural optimization problems

In this paper, mixed categorical structural optimization problems are investigated. The aim is to minimize the weight of a truss structure with respect to cross-section areas, materials, and cross-section type. The proposed methodology consists of using a bi-level decomposition involving two problems: master and slave. The master problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear problem where the linear constraints are incrementally augmented using outer approximations of the slave problem solution. The slave problem addresses the continuous variables of the optimization problem. The proposed methodology is tested on three different structural optimization test cases with increasing complexity. The comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms emphasizes the efficiency of the proposed methodology in terms of the optimum quality, computation cost, as well as its scalability with respect to the problem dimension. A challenging 120-bar dome truss optimization problem with 90 categorical choices per bar is also tested. The obtained results showed that our method is able to solve efficiently large-scale mixed categorical structural optimization problems.

Applications of Bayesian shrinkage prior models in clinical research with categorical responses

BackgroundPrediction and classification algorithms are commonly used in clinical research for identifying patients susceptible to clinical conditions such as diabetes, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. Developing accurate prediction and classification methods benefits personalized medicine. Building an excellent predictive model involves selecting the features that are most significantly associated with the outcome. These features can include several biological and demographic characteristics, such as genomic biomarkers and health history. Such variable selection becomes challenging when the number of potential predictors is large. Bayesian shrinkage models have emerged as popular and flexible methods of variable selection in regression settings. This work discusses variable selection with three shrinkage priors and illustrates its application to clinical data such as Pima Indians Diabetes, Colon cancer, ADNI, and OASIS Alzheimer’s real-world data.MethodsA unified Bayesian hierarchical framework that implements and compares shrinkage priors in binary and multinomial logistic regression models is presented. The key feature is the representation of the likelihood by a Polya-Gamma data augmentation, which admits a natural integration with a family of shrinkage priors, specifically focusing on Horseshoe, Dirichlet Laplace, and Double Pareto priors. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to assess the performances under different data dimensions and parameter settings. Measures of accuracy, AUC, brier score, L1 error, cross-entropy, and ROC surface plots are used as evaluation criteria comparing the priors with frequentist methods as Lasso, Elastic-Net, and Ridge regression.ResultsAll three priors can be used for robust prediction on significant metrics, irrespective of their categorical response model choices. Simulation studies could achieve the mean prediction accuracy of 91.6% (95% CI: 88.5, 94.7) and 76.5% (95% CI: 69.3, 83.8) for logistic regression and multinomial logistic models, respectively. The model can identify significant variables for disease risk prediction and is computationally efficient.ConclusionsThe models are robust enough to conduct both variable selection and prediction because of their high shrinkage properties and applicability to a broad range of classification problems.

Transforming absolute value to categorical choice in primate superior colliculus during value-based decision making

Value-based decision making involves choosing from multiple options with different values. Despite extensive studies on value representation in various brain regions, the neural mechanism for how multiple value options are converted to motor actions remains unclear. To study this, we developed a multi-value foraging task with varying menu of items in non-human primates using eye movements that dissociates value and choice, and conducted electrophysiological recording in the midbrain superior colliculus (SC). SC neurons encoded “absolute” value, independent of available options, during late fixation. In addition, SC neurons also represent value threshold, modulated by available options, different from conventional motor threshold. Electrical stimulation of SC neurons biased choices in a manner predicted by the difference between the value representation and the value threshold. These results reveal a neural mechanism directly transforming absolute values to categorical choices within SC, supporting highly efficient value-based decision making critical for real-world economic behaviors.

Factors Influencing Motion Event Categorization Choices in Non-linguistic Tasks: The Effects of Manner Noticeability and Boundary Crossing on English and Japanese Speakers

Factors Influencing Motion Event Categorization Choices in Non-linguistic Tasks: The Effects of Manner Noticeability and Boundary Crossing on English and Japanese Speakers

Choices change the temporal weighting of decision evidence.

Many decisions result from the accumulation of decision-relevant information (evidence) over time. Even when maximizing decision accuracy requires weighting all the evidence equally, decision-makers often give stronger weight to evidence occurring early or late in the evidence stream. Here, we show changes in such temporal biases within participants as a function of intermittent judgments about parts of the evidence stream. Human participants performed a decision task that required a continuous estimation of the mean evidence at the end of the stream. The evidence was either perceptual (noisy random dot motion) or symbolic (variable sequences of numbers). Participants also reported a categorical judgment of the preceding evidence half-way through the stream in one condition or executed an evidence-independent motor response in another condition. The relative impact of early versus late evidence on the final estimation flipped between these two conditions. In particular, participants' sensitivity to late evidence after the intermittent judgment, but not the simple motor response, was decreased. Both the intermittent response as well as the final estimation reports were accompanied by nonluminance-mediated increases of pupil diameter. These pupil dilations were bigger during intermittent judgments than simple motor responses and bigger during estimation when the late evidence was consistent than inconsistent with the initial judgment. In sum, decisions activate pupil-linked arousal systems and alter the temporal weighting of decision evidence. Our results are consistent with the idea that categorical choices in the face of uncertainty induce a change in the state of the neural circuits underlying decision-making.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The psychology and neuroscience of decision-making have extensively studied the accumulation of decision-relevant information toward a categorical choice. Much fewer studies have assessed the impact of a choice on the processing of subsequent information. Here, we show that intermittent choices during a protracted stream of input reduce the sensitivity to subsequent decision information and transiently boost arousal. Choices might trigger a state change in the neural machinery for decision-making.

Evidence accumulation under uncertainty - a neural marker of emerging choice and urgency

To interact meaningfully with its environment, an agent must integrate external information with its own internal states. However, information about the environment is often noisy. In this study, we identify a neural correlate that tracks how asymmetries between competing alternatives evolve over the course of a decision. In our task participants had to monitor a stream of discrete visual stimuli over time and decide whether or not to act, on the basis of either strong or ambiguous evidence. We found that the classic P3 event-related potential evoked by sequential evidence items tracked decision-making processes and predicted participants’ categorical choices on a single trial level, both when evidence was strong and when it was ambiguous. The P3 amplitudes in response to evidence supporting the eventually selected option increased over trial time as decisions evolved, being maximally different from the P3 amplitudes evoked by competing evidence at the time of decision. Computational modelling showed that both the neural dynamics and behavioural primacy and recency effects can be explained by a combination of (a) competition between mutually inhibiting accumulators for the two categorical choice outcomes, and (b) a context-dependant urgency signal. In conditions where evidence was presented at a low rate, urgency increased faster than in conditions when evidence was very frequent. We also found that the readiness potential, a classic marker of endogenously initiated actions, was observed preceding movements in all conditions - even when those were strongly driven by external evidence.

Response modality-dependent categorical choice representations for vibrotactile comparisons

Previous electrophysiological studies in monkeys and humans suggest that premotor regions are the primary loci for the encoding of perceptual choices during vibrotactile comparisons. However, these studies employed paradigms wherein choices were inextricably linked with the stimulus order and selection of manual movements. It remains largely unknown how vibrotactile choices are represented when they are decoupled from these sensorimotor components of the task. To address this question, we used fMRI-MVPA and a variant of the vibrotactile frequency discrimination task which enabled the isolation of choice-related signals from those related to stimulus order and selection of the manual decision reports. We identified the left contralateral dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) as carrying information about vibrotactile choices. Our finding provides empirical evidence for an involvement of the PMd and IPS in vibrotactile decisions that goes above and beyond the coding of stimulus order and specific action selection. Considering findings from recent studies in animals, we speculate that the premotor region likely serves as a temporary storage site for information necessary for the specification of concrete manual movements, while the IPS might be more directly involved in the computation of choice. Moreover, this finding replicates results from our previous work using an oculomotor variant of the task, with the important difference that the informative premotor cluster identified in the previous work was centered in the bilateral frontal eye fields rather than in the PMd. Evidence from these two studies indicates that categorical choices in human vibrotactile comparisons are represented in a response modality-dependent manner.

Arguing for Teachers and for Friends: Eighth-graders’ Sensitivity to Argumentation Features When Judging and Revising Persuasive Essays

ABSTRACT A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents’ judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students’ categorical choices about the purposes to which the essays were suited (e.g., convincing a friend, impressing a language-arts teacher), discussions of those choices, and a revision of their selected “least persuasive” essay. In this first study using the FEXA, we found that the essays judged most persuasive largely overlapped with those judged most likely to earn a good grade (i.e., those with rich evidence and academic language). Students explained their preferences by mentioning formal language, use of evidence, and essay structure, while their revisions of their “least persuasive” selections focused on linguistic features and on adding or elaborating reasons. Implications for argumentative writing instruction and assessment are discussed.

Trends in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Utilization in a Large Integrated Health Care System

There are few population-based studies addressing trends in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admission and NICU patient-days, especially in the subpopulation that, by gestational age (GA) and birth weight (BW), might otherwise be able to stay in the room with their mothers. To describe population-based trends in NICU admissions, NICU patient-days, readmissions, and mortality in the birth population of a large integrated health care system. This cohort study was conducted using data extracted from electronic medical records at Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC) health care system. Participants included all women who gave birth at KPSC hospitals and their newborns from January 1, 2010, through December 31, 2018. Data extraction was limited to data entry fields whose contents were either numbers or fixed categorical choices. Rates of NICU admission, NICU patient-days, readmission rates, and mortality rates were measured in the total population, in newborns with GA 35 weeks or greater and BW 2000 g or more (high GA and BW group), and in the remaining newborns (low GA and BW group). Admissions to the NICU and NICU patient-days were risk adjusted with a machine learning model based on demographic and clinical characteristics before NICU admission. Changes in the trends were assessed with 2-sided correlated seasonal Mann-Kendall test. Data analysis was performed in August 2019. Admission to the NICU and NICU patient-days among the birth cohort. The primary outcomes were NICU admission and NICU patient-days in the total neonatal population and GA and BW subgroups. The secondary outcomes were readmission and mortality rates. Over the study period there were 320 340 births (mean [SD] age of mothers, 30.1 [5.7] years; mean [SD] gestational age, 38.6 [1.97] weeks; mean [SD] birth weight, 3302 [573] g). The risk-adjusted NICU admission rate decreased from a mean of 14.5% (95% CI, 14.2%-14.7%) to 10.9% (95% CI, 10.7%-11.7%) (P for trend = .002); 92% of the change was associated with changes in the care of newborns in the high GA and BW group. The number of risk-adjusted NICU patient-days per birth decreased from a mean of 1.50 patient-days (95% CI, 1.43-1.54 patient-days) to 1.40 patient-days (95% CI, 1.36-1.48 patient-days) (P for trend = .03); 70% of the change was associated with newborns in the high GA and BW group. The unadjusted 30-day readmission rates and mortality rates did not change. Admission rates to the NICU and numbers of NICU patient-days decreased over the study period without an increase in readmissions or mortality. The observed decrease was associated with the high GA and BW newborn population. How much of this decrease is attributable to intercurrent health care systemwide quality improvement initiatives would require further investigation. The remaining unexplained variation suggests that further changes are also possible.

Causal contributions of human frontal eye fields to distinct aspects of decision formation

Several theories propose that perceptual decision making depends on the gradual accumulation of information that provides evidence in favour of one of the choice-options. The outcome of this temporally extended integration process is thought to be categorized into the ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ choice-options for action. Neural correlates of corresponding decision formation processes have been observed in various frontal and parietal brain areas, among them the frontal eye-fields (FEF). However, the specific functional role of the FEFs is debated. Recent studies in humans and rodents provide conflicting accounts, proposing that the FEF either accumulate the choice-relevant information or categorize the outcome of such evidence integration into discrete actions. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on humans to interfere with either left or right FEF activity during different timepoints of perceptual decision-formation. Stimulation of either FEF affected performance only when delivered during information integration but not during subsequent categorical choice. However, the patterns of behavioural changes suggest that the left-FEF contributes to general evidence integration, whereas right-FEF may direct spatial attention to the contralateral hemifield. Taken together, our results indicate an FEF involvement in evidence accumulation but not categorization, and suggest hemispheric lateralization for this function in the human brain.

Self‐Reported Student Assessments as Predictors of Gross Anatomy Success

This study sought to identify factors that contribute to success in an interprofessional, graduate‐level, cadaveric anatomy courses, composed of physical therapy (DPT) and occupational therapy (MOT) students. One hypothesis predicted that team‐based learning (TBL) would improve student outcomes. A second hypothesis predicted that students classified by the M4 (highly capable and confident) category, of the Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory, would be more successful in the anatomy course. The course utilized two different types of cadavers – traditionally‐embalmed (TEC) and soft‐embalmed (SEC). Analysis was conducted on self‐reported factors, from graduate level DPT and MOT students, which could underlie success in a cadaveric gross anatomy course. The participants consisted of 34 MOT and 33 DPT first‐year cohort students, who completed an 18 question Qualtrics self‐reported survey consisting of Likert scales, categorical choices, and open‐ended responses, regarding their overall performance in a cadaveric gross anatomy lab and lecture course. Based on the participants’ responses to the survey, it was found that the mean lab grade for students who dissected the TEC cadaver was only marginally lower than students who dissected the SEC cadaver. The mean lab grade for students with three group members was slightly lower than the mean grade of students with four group members (87.80 vs. 88.82). These results indicated that TBL in the lab was not a significant factor, as there was little difference in average lab grade when comparing three‐ and four‐person teams. Participants responded that their average skill level before participation in dissection was 1.4 and after was 3.61, which was found to be significantly different (p < 0.001). Studying up to eight hours per week appeared to be the optimal time that yielded successful results. Variability in reported time spent studying and grades suggests that quality needs to be taken into account. Results from other survey questions did not support the hypothesis that students fitting the M4 category of Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Theory would be more successful in the anatomy course. Overall, success appeared to be most dependent on a cumulative result from hands‐on experience, learning style, and quality of study.

Oxytocin alters the effect of payoff but not base rate in emotion perception

Emotion perception, inferring the emotional state of another person, can be formalized as decision under uncertainty: another person’s scowling face may indicate anger or concentration and the optimal inference is contingent on the decision consequences (payoff) and how likely real anger is encountered (base rate). Although emerging evidence suggests that the neuropeptide oxytocin influences human perception of emotional facial expressions, whether such effect relates to the alternated process of payoff or base rate still remains unclear. In addition, little is known about oxytocin’s effect on metacognitive process involved in emotion perception. One hundred and twenty-two healthy male adults (sixty-two in Experiment 1 and sixty in Experiment 2, respectively) received 24 international units (IU) of intranasal oxytocin or placebo (between-subjects) in a randomized and double-blind study. We independently and systematically manipulated the payoff and base rate levels in an emotion categorization task and measured participants’ response bias via categorization choice and metacognitive sensitivity via confidence report. Compared to the placebo group, oxytocin specifically induced a categorization bias under the payoff, but not base rate manipulation. In contrast, oxytocin had no effect on subjects’ confidence rating, indicating that the metacognitive sensitivity can be dissociated from emotion perception. Our results pinpoint the specific role of oxytocin in payoff evaluation, but not target likelihood estimation and provide a potential theoretical framework to bridge oxytocin research in emotion perception, social cognition and value-based decisions.