Cognitive Procedures Research Articles

The effects of cognitive abilities on driving in people with Parkinson's disease

Objective: The aim was to develop a cognitive screening procedure, which could be used to identify cognitive problems in patients with Parkinson's disease, which might affect their safety to drive.Design: Two group comparison of those found safe to drive and those found unsafe.Setting: People living in the community who were attending an outpatient Movement Disorders clinic or who had been referred to a Regional Mobility Centre.Participants: Fifty-one people with Parkinson's disease who were driving or who wished to resume driving. The 41 men and 10 women were aged 44 – 85 years (mean 64.4 SD 9.1).Main measures: Webster's Rating Scale, Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale motor examination, Stroke Drivers Screening Assessment, Adult Memory and Information Processing Battery, Stroop, Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task and a Tapping task.Results: The unsafe drivers were significantly more disabled, as assessed on Webster's Scale, than those who were found safe to drive. There were no significant differences in the cognitive abilities of safe and unsafe drivers. The most common faults, which caused drivers to be judged unsafe, were lack of observations to the side at junctions, poor positioning on the road and poor driving on roundabouts. There were significant correlations (p < 0.05) between driving ability and performance on the SDSA Dot Cancellation task and the AMIPB Story Recall and Information Processing A.Conclusions: Cognitive abilities were not found to be associated with fitness to drive in people with Parkinson's disease. Webster's Rating Scale differentiated between safe and unsafe drivers. This could be used to determine who to refer to a mobility centre for advice on fitness to drive.

Procedural priming effects on spontaneous inference formation

Procedural priming refers to how the frequent or recent use of certain cognitive procedures on one task can lead to a greater propensity to use the same procedures on a subsequent task. In this paper, we demonstrate how procedural priming may be used to assess spontaneous inference formation in situations where the inference involves a relationship or rule. We do so in the context of the advertising cost–product quality rule, i.e., that “higher advertising expense implies higher product quality.” Prior research suggests that underlying the advertising cost–quality rule is a basic human attribution (the effort investment rule) that says, if someone invests a lot of effort in a cause, it implies a true belief in that cause. We prime the effort investment rule in an interpersonal context and show that this affects spontaneous generation of the advertising cost–quality rule in an advertising context.

Type d’étayage en rééducation orthophonique: émergence et développement de stratégies d’appropriation ou de réappropriation de l’écrit

As a speech and language therapist dealing with children in difficulties with written language, I chose to reflect upon what children know or may tell about the way they operate in that matter. Works carried out by J. Piaget, L.S. Vygotski, J.S. Bruner, about the development and learning in children in various areas of research (development psychology, social psychology of cognitive development) enabled me to build the following hypothesis: interactive strategies used by an «expert-adult» may allow the birth and implementation, with the learner, of cognitive and linguistic procedures. These procedures lead to appropriation or re-appropriation of the written language. I consider speech and language therapy for written language disorders, as a particular verbal interaction situation, enabling the pointing out of strategies across individuals’ interactions: scaffolding strategies (planned or improvised) on the adult side, cognitive, metacognitive and socioaffective strategies on the children side. In this article I will describe the children’s «reactions».

The Progressive Construction of Communication: Toward a Model of Cognitive Networked Communication and Knowledge Communities

Networked communication allows the emergence of a new social reality: knowledge communities in cognitive networks. This paper formulates a model of cognitive networked communication and knowledge communities. This model aims to show the progressive construction of communication and is based on an integrative view of conviviality (participation and engagement) and knowledge building(intentionality, individual and social representations that shape different levels of collaboration and influence learning in interpersonal relationships). The model suggests communication can progress from lower to higher cognitive levels, and that those levels are apparent in different types of communities. Although community communication is essentially structured through cognitive procedures ( logos), the model also suggests that it is shaped by affectivity and emotions ( pathos), and moral and cultural values, beliefs, and opinions ( ethos).

Is probability matching smart? Associations between probabilistic choices and cognitive ability

In three experiments involving over 1,500 university students (n = 1,557) and two different probabilistic choice tasks, we found that the utility-maximizing strategy of choosing the most probable alternative was not the majority response. In a story problem version of a probabilistic choice task in which participants chose from among five different strategies,the maximizing response and the probability-matching response were each selected by a similar number of students (roughly 35% of the sample selected each). In a more continuous, or trial-by-trial, task, the utility-maximizing response was chosen by only one half as many students asthe probability-matching response. More important, in both versions of the task, the participants preferring the utility-maximizing response were significantly higher in cognitive ability than were the participants showing a probability-matching tendency. Critiques of the traditional interpretation of probability matching as nonoptimal may well help explain why some humans are drawn to the nonmaximizing behavior of probability matching, but the traditional heuristics and biases interpretation can most easily accommodate the finding that participants high in computational ability are more likely to carry out the rule-based cognitive procedures that lead to maximizing behavior.

Cognitive procedures for correcting proxy‐response biases in surveys

AbstractTo reduce survey costs, major surveys rely on self‐ and proxy‐responses. The use of proxies can reduce data quality introducing biases in the survey estimates. This paper identifies one source of systematic differences between self‐ and proxy‐reports: proxies' higher reliance on inferences. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey on Disability (NHIS‐D), proxy‐response biases were modelled by independently collected measures of cognitive inferences. Conditional likelihood judgements about a number of disabilities (e.g. likelihood that a person has a disability given another disability) predicted the conditional disability reports for proxy‐ but not for self‐respondents (e.g. the proportion of respondents who reported difficulty learning after reporting difficulty communicating). A model of self/proxy differences was estimated on data from the 1994 NHIS‐D and tested against 1995 data. The correlation between predicted and actual differences was 0.76. The correlation between predicted and actual proxy‐reports was 0.95. Such research can be used to estimate and correct for systematic proxy‐response biases. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Categorising the compositional thinking of tertiary-level students: a provisional taxonomy

This article derives from a study completed in Singapore involving tertiary-level music students beginning composition. The purpose of the study was to describe the cognitive procedures used by the students in the process of composing. Think-aloud protocols provided the primary source of data, although this was triangulated with other sources, such as classroom observation notes, scores/sketches, and subjects' retrospective accounts. Among the results was the development of a taxonomy to categorise various procedures and contextual issues in the composing process. It is offered here as a provisional starting-point for further research into student composing.

Schizophrenia: A genetic perspective (Review)

Schizophrenia is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by mental dysfunction across multiple domains of the brain. It affects 1% of world's general population and the nature of neurobiological lesions in the schizophrenic brain are not known. Although the exact etiology of the disorder is not understood, twin, family and adoption studies have provided consistent evidence that genetic factors play a major role in the pathogenesis. A genome-wide genetic linkage screen identified loci on chromosomes 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 22 and the X with positive lod scores, thus excluding a single major locus for schizophrenia. Association studies have generated disappointing results in identifying the susceptible DNA sequence variants and the anticipation hypothesis on trinucleotide repeat expansion provided equivocal results or lack of enthusiasm. Although there are no biological markers at present, the recent finding that human endogenous retrovirus is activated in cerebrospinal fluid as well as in the postmortem schizophrenic brain may change our understanding of the etiopathogenesis of this disease. Meanwhile, treatment with newly developed anti-psychotic drugs combined with educational and cognitive rehabilitation procedure may help the patients to cope with the illness.

Perceived Stress and Anxiety Sensitivity in the Prediction of Anxiety-Related Responding: A Multichallenge Evaluation

We have provided a laboratory evaluation of emotional reactivity to physiological (hyperventilation), cognitive (mental arithmetic), and social (speech) challenge procedures, and investigated how preexperimental levels of perceived stress, anxiety sensitivity, and negative-evaluation sensitivity predicted anxious and fearful responding. Participants were 37 nonclinical individuals. Dependent measures included a multimethod assessment involving self-reported anxiety, frequency and intensity of bodily sensations, and heart rate and blood pressure responses to the challenges. Our results indicated that preexperimental levels of perceived stress were more predictive than other theoretically relevant variables of self-reported anxiety-related reactivity to cognitive and social challenges, whereas anxiety sensitivity was a better predictor of the emotional response to hyperventilation. Collectively, these findings are consistent with theoretical accounts of anxiety pathology, and suggest that perceived stress is an important process variable to consider in understanding the determinants of anxiety-related responding.

QUALITATIVE REPRESENTATION OF PROCESS TRENDS FOR SITUATION ASSESSMENT BASED ON CASES

Situation assessment in complex systems is often achieved by expert operators taking into account evolution of signals and comparing it with previous experiences. The criteria used by operators to compare actual situations with previous ones are not easily explainable and in fact they are part of the cognitive procedure. This paper proposes to use qualitative representations of signal trends as experienced cases. The work is centred in two main aspects. First, episodes based representation of signal trends proposed in the CHEM project is used as a description of cases. Then, a similarity criterion among signal representations is defined by a Dynamic Time Warping approach. The usefulness of the approach is shown in an illustrative example by representing and comparing signal dynamics with the goal of Situation Assessment.

La pensee Chinoise et l'abstraction (review)

Reviewed by: La pensée Chinoise et l'abstraction Mary Tiles La pensée Chinoise et l'abstraction. By Anna Ghiglione. Paris: Éditions You-Feng, 1999. Pp. 303. In La pensée Chinoise et l'abstraction Anna Ghiglione deploys the methods of analytic philosophy of language to exhibit the many and various means used by ancient (pre-Qin) Chinese philosophers to express abstract ideas. This is done in order to make the larger point that characteristics of a language, whether Chinese, Greek, Latin, French, or English, do not on their own explain differences in philosophical style or the presence or absence of particular kinds of philosophical theorizing. The stalking horse here is the Western sinological tradition, which, from its very beginnings in the seventeenth century, has been shaped by the views of those such as Athanasius Kircher, who denounced the inadequate means afforded by Chinese characters for expressing matters sacred. Even in the twentieth century, Ghiglione suggests, Chinese studies has been informed by a collective representation that portrays Chinese language and thought as deficient by comparison with Western languages and systems of philosophy, because the former lacks vehicles for the expression of abstract ideas. The other large issue in the background here is the relation between any language and formal logic, which is in turn treated as a mark of rationality. As Ghiglione notes, the twentieth century has seen a quest, both in China and in the West, for characterizations of a distinctively Chinese rationality. These have not been able to shake off their defensive tone—in the defense of Chinese culture from the dangers of Westernization. The problem is that there is an inevitable ambivalence in any program that seeks to interpret the thought and cultural history of the Chinese according to criteria where universalism, occidentalism, and modernism are frequently intertwined. One of the virtues of this work is that it demands much more precision of those who approach Chinese philosophy. Exactly what can be meant by saying that Chinese as a language lacks mechanisms for abstraction, or that Chinese philosophers stick to the concrete and the particular? As Ghiglione points out, part of the problem with talk of abstraction is that the term itself is polysemic. It can mean a collection of speculations on questions that might be either abstract or concrete, or it can refer to the cognitive procedures that lead to such theorization. Again, it is possible to formulate abstract questions about concrete topics and to raise such questions without formulating any abstract theories. Moreover, abstraction can occur without anyone formulating a philosophical theory about it. In particular, one must clearly distinguish between abstraction as an operation and the hypostatization of abstract entities. [End Page 554] Abstraction as an operation plays a fundamental role in the acquisition and elaboration of knowledge. Here abstraction and conceptualization go hand in hand, and it is presumed that all human beings, as language users, have and deploy this capacity. The problem of abstract entities, or universals, has been a major theme in Western philosophy but has not figured prominently in Chinese philosophy. Does such a lack of interest reflect a lack of abstractions or of elaboration of abstract concepts? Ghiglione argues in detail that this is not the case. She does this by analyzing the uses made by pre-Qin philosophers of specific characters in articulating philosophic positions concerning reality, change, the discrimination of things, resemblances, names (language), and wisdom. Throughout, her aim is to reveal the mechanisms by which abstraction is effected and abstract concepts expressed. She does not question the reading according to which the Chinese vision of the world is of a dynamic reality, where contraries are conceived as complementary and where the relationships between elements take precedence over the elements themselves. Her argument is merely that having a dynamic conception of reality does not rule out the possibility of postulating abstract objects, such as the gu zhi dao (the way of antiquity), which constitutes an immutable model, an idealized prototype for judging the present. In chapter 4 Ghiglione seeks to undermine any sharp opposition of a Chinese logic of resemblance to a Western logic of identity. Pointing out that while comparison plays a fundamental role in...

ANGER CONTROL FOR PEOPLE WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES: A CRITICAL REVIEW

The literature on the use of cognitively based anger control packages of treatment for people with learning disabilities is reviewed. It is found that the experimental evidence for the effectiveness of such treatment is weak. There is, however, good evidence that two of the components of the package, relaxation and self-monitoring, can be effective in their own right, with relaxation being found to reduce anger and self-monitoring to reduce other challenging behaviours. The use of cognitive procedures with people who have learning disabilities is discussed.

Child and Adolescent Therapy: Cognitive Behavioral Procedures (Second Edition)

Child and Adolescent Therapy: Cognitive Behavioral Procedures (Second Edition) Philip C. Kendall (Ed.). New York: Guilford Press (www.guilford.com). 2000, 425 pp., $46.00 (hardcover). There have been many recent advances in the application of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) as a treatment for child and adolescent clinical populations. Innovative conceptual models, new intervention strategies, and several manual-based treatment protocols have been introduced. The second edition of Phil Kendall's Child and Adolescent Therapy offers an easy-to-read description of these cutting-edge psychotherapy interventions for youth, with full coverage of relevant theory, research, and practice basics. Like the first edition, this follow-up text provides a scholarly account of cognitive behavioral treatments targeting children and adolescents with a variety of disorders and behavioral problems. Covering the most recent developments in the field, the editor has assembled a series of critical reviews that are timely, informative, and comprehensive in scope. The book is purposeful in its emphasis on evidence-based treatments and fully promotes a scientist-practitioner agenda. The first chapter, written by the editor, provides a guiding theoretical framework for conducting treatment with children and adolescents. Kendall's model effectively integrates developmental and experiential factors (e.g., problem solving, cognitive abilities, emotional and interpersonal functioning) in an attempt to explain processes of therapeutic change. Whereas leading experts in the field of treatment outcome research (Kazdin, 2000) continue to highlight the need for discussion and investigation of psychotherapy change mechanisms, Kendall explicitly addresses this limitation by proposing a temporal model that considers behavioral contingencies in the development of a cognitive coping template. The chapter also addresses issues relevant to understanding potential limitations and expectations for therapeutic change when working with this population, for example, normal developmental trajectories. Subsequent chapters cover specific problem areas including aggression, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anger management, depression, anxiety disorders, and chronic health conditions. While this list is not exhaustive, these conditions are certainly representative of clinical child populations and include those disorders found to be most prevalent in this age group. …

A Procedural Explanation of the Generation Effect for Simple and Difficult Multiplication Problems and Answers

Three experiments investigated the generation effect for the free recall of multiplication problems and answers. In Experiment 1, a greater generation effect for answer recall was found for participants presented with simple as compared to those presented with difficult multiplication problems. This finding is inconsistent with an explanation of the generation effect in terms of effort. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and further demonstrated that participants show an equivalent generation effect for problem operands (i.e., the cues) regardless of problem difficulty. Generation accuracy also influenced the magnitude of the generation effect in the difficult problem condition. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1, holding constant problem answers across simple and difficult problems. These experiments collectively demonstrated a generation effect for the answers to arithmetic problems only when participants reinstated at test the cognitive procedures used at study, thus providing further evidence for the procedural account of the generation effect.

FORTY YEARS OF PSYCHOSOCIAL TREATMENTS

Over the last 40 years certain psychosocial treatments have made great strides on the long road towards becoming a reliable clinical science. A mark of this maturation is the recent enabling of sufferers from anxiety disorders and depression to help themselves when guided by particular manual or computer self-help systems, indicating that several effective therapeutic mechanisms have become reasonably defined. Still unknown, however, is exactly how many separate therapeutic paths are being trodden to improve anxiety and depression, and how much various tracks converge on common mechanisms. Careful dismantling studies may in time reveal that some behavioural, cognitive and interpersonal therapy procedures are in fact proxies for administering as yet dimly-perceived therapeutic principles. Progress would accelerate further once therapists were required to specify how much they improve their patients on simple and widely-agreed measures of outcome and cost, and once they learn to speak a broad-accepted common language.

Attributing Social Meaning to Ambiguous Visual Stimuli in Higher‐functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Social Attribution Task

More able individuals with autism and Asperger syndrome (AS) have been shown to pass relatively high level theory of mind (ToM) tasks without displaying commensurate levels of social adaptation in naturalistic settings. This paper presents a social cognitive procedure the Social Attribution Task (SAT) that reduces factors thought to facilitate ToM task performance without facilitating real-life social functioning. Sixty participants with autism (N = 20), AS (N = 20), and normally developing adolescents and adults (N = 20) with normative IQs were asked to provide narratives describing Heider and Simmel's (1944) silent cartoon animation in which geometric shapes enact a social plot. These narratives were coded in terms of the participants' abilities to attribute social meaning to the geometric cartoon. The SAT provides reliable and quantified scores on seven indices of social cognition. Results revealed marked deficits in both clinical groups across all indices. These deficits were not related to verbal IQ or level of metalinguistic skills. Individuals with autism and AS identified about a quarter of the social elements in the story, a third of their attributions were irrelevant to the social plot, and they used pertinent ToM terms very infrequently. They were also unable to derive psychologically based personality features from the shapes' movements. When provided with more explicit verbal information on the nature of the cartoon, individuals with AS improved their performance slightly more than those with autism, but not significantly so.

The Psychological Effects of Pre-Competitive Stress on Elite Divers — A Review

Stress occurs when appraisal of the demands of a situation exceed the available resources under conditions where failure to meet the demand is perceived as having negative consequences. Stress is neither considered to be merely an event or response but rather a complex interaction of interrelated constructs and processes reflecting the relationship between intrapersonal and stituational variables. Although, the identification of general categories of stress is possible; it is important to acknowledge the significance of individual differences, especially with respect to cognitive evaluation procedures. The concurrent responses considered in this paper are self-confidence and state anxiety; both of which are related to potential pre-competitive performance stress. Antecedents and consequences are examined with respect to elite competitive springboard divers. Recommendations for future research propose continuous assessment strategies.

DEN MAGISKE ILLUSION? En kognitiv tilgang til magiske ritualer

The concept of magic is one of the most&#x0D; contested concepts in anthropology. It has&#x0D; been criticised as an illusion created by early&#x0D; anthropology’s primitivist understanding of&#x0D; other – notably non-European – cultures.&#x0D; This has led to a general agreement to&#x0D; abandon the term, if not in praxis then&#x0D; theoretically. The author questions whether&#x0D; the concept should be abandoned and instead&#x0D; he proposes a reformulation based on the&#x0D; realisation that magic is a broad analytical&#x0D; category about which one cannot produce&#x0D; theories. Rather, theories must address the&#x0D; phenomena observed and categorised as&#x0D; magic. The author advocates a cognitive&#x0D; approach to magic and magical ritual based&#x0D; on the theory of “conceptual blending”&#x0D; proposed by linguist Gilles Fauconnier and&#x0D; literary Mark Turner. The theory of conceptual&#x0D; blending presents a new possibility&#x0D; to approach the explicitly metaphorical and&#x0D; metonymic content in magical practices and&#x0D; spells. Thus, magic is not based on a special&#x0D; type of causality, but rather in the exploitation&#x0D; of ordinary cognitive procedures&#x0D; in special pragmatic circumstances, namely&#x0D; ritual, in order to achieve a specific result. At&#x0D; the same time, the author aims to show how&#x0D; symbolic interpretations are de-emphasised&#x0D; in magical rituals in order to enhance more&#x0D; basic processes of meaning construction,&#x0D; which gives magic a special relation to&#x0D; institutionalised religion.&#x0D;

Development of the ability to judge relative areas: Role of the procedure of placing one object on another

This study examined the role of the cognitive procedure of superimposition in the development of an area concept. Forty-five children from age 4 to 6 were presented with target squares or rectangles and asked to choose one that was equal to two standard rectangles in area. In the perceptual judgment condition, children compared these figures just by looking; whereas, in the manipulative judgment condition, they placed the standard figures on the targets. Children were also asked to compare the sizes of geometric figures, and their spontaneous strategies were observed. The children performed better under the manipulative judgment condition than under the perceptual judgment condition, and their performance was facilitated when one target could be overlapped completely with the standard figures. Each of these facilitating effects was found independently of the other only in children who used the strategy of superimposition spontaneously for comparing sizes.

The Role of Sublexical Graphemic Processing in Reading

Dual-route models of reading postulate the existence of two separate mechanisms: The lexical route allows words to be recognized in their holistic form, and the sublexical route proceeds by converting the written sublexical entities of a word or a nonword into their corresponding phonological equivalents. Sublexical reading is assumed to require three stages of processing: graphemic parsing, graphophonemic conversion, and phoneme blending. This study provides evidence in favor of the existence of a graphemic parsing process which occurs prior to grapheme–phoneme conversion. A group of normal subjects read nonwords which contained multiletter graphemes significantly more slowly than graphemically simple nonwords. These results, best interpretable in the context of a recent dual-route model of reading, confirm previous data obtained in pathology which suggest the functional independence of this cognitive procedure.