Irrelevant Material Research Articles

Interference resolution in major depression

In two experiments, we investigated individual differences in the ability to resolve interference in participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). Participants were administered the "Ignore/Suppress" task, a short-term memory task composed of two steps. In Step 1 ("ignore"), participants were instructed to memorize a set of stimuli while ignoring simultaneously presented irrelevant material. In Step 2 ("suppress"), participants were instructed to forget a subset of the previously memorized material. The ability to resolve interference was indexed by response latencies on two recognition tasks in which participants decided whether a probe was a member of the target set. In Step 1, we compared response latencies to probes from the to-be-ignored list with response latencies to nonrecently presented items. In Step 2, we compared response latencies to probes from the to-be-suppressed list with response latencies to nonrecently presented items. The results indicate that, compared with control participants, depressed participants exhibited increased interference in the "suppress" but not in the "ignore" step of the task, when the stimuli were negative words. No group differences were obtained when we presented letters instead of emotional words. These findings indicate that depression is associated with difficulty in removing irrelevant negative material from short-term memory.

Attentional blink magnitude is predicted by the ability to keep irrelevant material out of working memory

Participants have difficulty in reporting the second of two masked targets if the second target is presented within 500 ms of the first target-an attentional blink (AB). Individual participants differ in the magnitude of their AB. The present study employed an individual differences design and two visual working memory tasks to examine whether visual working memory capacity and/or the ability to exclude irrelevant information from visual working memory (working memory filtering efficiency) could predict individual differences in the AB. Visual working memory capacity was positively related to filtering efficiency, but did not predict AB magnitude. However, the degree to which irrelevant stimuli were admitted into visual working memory (i.e., poor filtering efficiency) was positively correlated with AB magnitude over and above visual working memory capacity. Good filtering efficiency may benefit the AB by not allowing irrelevant RSVP distractors to gain access to working memory.

Format and structure of the new part 2 MRCOG examination: I

It is fair to say that the both parts of the MRCOG examination have undergone radical surgery over the last decade. Although the main driver for this change was the demand from the UK Postgraduate Medical Training and Education Board (PMETB) for Colleges to create more educationally valid and transparent examinations, the RCOG sensibly used this impetus to improve many aspects of the examination process. The new system has passed PMETB scrutiny with flying colours and is as close to being ‘fit for purpose’ as financial and practical constraints allow. The Part 1 syllabus has been overhauled using the mantra of ‘basic science as relevant to the clinical practice of obstetrics and gynaecology’. Much dead wood and irrelevant material has been removed and new areas of science enhanced within a comprehensive structured curriculum that provides clear guidance on content and aids to learning. The part 2 curriculum has also been completely rewritten and now offers candidates a much more user friendly structure that should allow them to follow the curriculum map through their years of training leading eventually to comprehensive knowledge and skills and appropriate professional attitudes and patterns of behaviour with smooth passage through the examination itself. The new curriculum is available on the RCOG website and has worked well since its introduction in 2004.

Interference by process, not content, determines semantic auditory distraction

Distraction by irrelevant background sound of visually-based cognitive tasks illustrates the vulnerability of attentional selectivity across modalities. Four experiments centred on auditory distraction during tests of memory for visually-presented semantic information. Meaningful irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars more than meaningless irrelevant sound (Experiment 1). This effect was exacerbated when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material (Experiment 2). Importantly, however, these effects of meaningfulness and semantic relatedness were shown to arise only when instructions emphasized recall by category rather than by serial order (Experiments 3 and 4). The results favor a process-oriented, rather than a structural, approach to the breakdown of attentional selectivity and forgetting: performance is impaired by the similarity of process brought to bear on the relevant and irrelevant material, not the similarity in item content.

Correction for Golomb, “Reply to Blazer et al. : Flawed challenges to ‘Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and Gulf War illnesses’,”

LETTER (ONLINE ONLY). For the letter “Reply to Blazer et al.: Flawed challenges to ‘Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and Gulf War illnesses’,” by Beatrice A. Golomb, which appeared in issue 33, August 19, 2008, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (105:E53; first published August 11, 2008; 10.1073/pnas.0805246105), the author notes that the following sentences were omitted from the end of the first paragraph of the letter: “Their statements are counter to fact. They mischaracterize the evidence, employ the introduction of irrelevant material, and exemplify flaws in inference, as I will illustrate.” The corrected letter appears below.

Can the Irrelevant Speech Effect Turn into a Stimulus Suffix Effect?

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) and the stimulus suffix effect (SSE) are two qualitatively different phenomena, although in both paradigms irrelevant auditory material is played while a verbal serial recall task is being performed. Jones, Macken, and Nicholls (2004) have proposed the effect of irrelevant speech on auditory serial recall to switch from an ISE to an SSE mechanism, if the auditory-perceptive similarity of relevant and irrelevant material is maximized. The experiment reported here (n = 36) tested this hypothesis by exploring auditory serial recall performance both under irrelevant speech and under speech suffix conditions. These speech materials were spoken either by the same voice as the auditory items to be recalled or by a different voice. The experimental conditions were such that the likelihood of obtaining an SSE was maximized. The results, however, show that irrelevant speech - in contrast to speech suffixes - affects auditory serial recall independently of its perceptive similarity to the items to be recalled and thus in terms of an ISE mechanism that crucially extends to recency. The ISE thus cannot turn into an SSE.

Updating the contents of working memory in depression: Interference from irrelevant negative material.

This study was designed to assess the effects of irrelevant emotional material on the ability to update the contents of working memory in depression. For each trial, participants were required to memorize 2 lists of emotional words and subsequently to ignore 1 of the lists. The impact of irrelevant emotional material on the ability to update the contents of working memory was indexed by response latencies on a recognition task in which the participants decided whether or not a probe was a member of the relevant list. The authors compared response latencies to probes from the irrelevant list to response latencies to novel probes of the same valence (intrusion effect). The results indicate that, compared to control participants in both neutral and sad mood states, depressed participants showed greater intrusion effects when presented with negative words. In an important finding, intrusion effects for negative words were correlated with self-reported rumination. These findings indicate that depression is associated with difficulties removing irrelevant negative material from working memory. Results also indicate that the increased interference from irrelevant negative material is associated with rumination.

Disruption of short-term memory by changing and deviant sounds: Support for a duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

The disruption of short-term memory by to-be-ignored auditory sequences (the changing-state effect) has often been characterized as attentional capture by deviant events (deviation effect). However, the present study demonstrates that changing-state and deviation effects are functionally distinct forms of auditory distraction: The disruption of visual-verbal serial recall by changing-state speech was independent of the effect of a single deviant voice embedded within the speech (Experiment 1); a voice-deviation effect, but not a changing-state effect, was found on a missing-item task (Experiment 2); and a deviant voice repetition within the context of an alternating-voice irrelevant speech sequence disrupted serial recall (Experiment 3). The authors conclude that the changing-state effect is the result of a conflict between 2 seriation processes being applied concurrently to relevant and irrelevant material, whereas the deviation effect reflects a more general attention-capture process.

Daniel Isn't Talking: A Novel

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessDaniel Isn't Talking: A NovelHarriet P. Lefley Ph.D.Harriet P. Lefley Ph.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Dec 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.12.1823AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail An elegant, insightful novel, Daniel Isn't Talking is about raising an autistic child. The experience is one of inordinate pressures, conflicting treatment approaches, disturbed households, and family conflict. The protagonist, Melanie, an American in London, marries an Englishman who is the man of her dreams. The birth of their children, Daniel and Emily, fulfills their dreams. But soon the mother knows something is wrong with Daniel, while the husband persists in denial. The couple fights. The husband withdraws. The marriage sours. A fashionable, carefree young woman becomes a frumpy, obsessive caregiver. This is not a new story. In fact, it is fairly typical when there is mental illness in the family, especially when it involves the unfathomable behavioral disorder of a child. Autism is particularly trying for parents. It is difficult to treat and yields little of the human reciprocity that people expect and need from those they love. And it offers an unpromising future for too many children who, with appropriate resources, may actually be capable of leading productive lives. Not too long ago, "refrigerator parents" and hostile mothers were blamed for causing this condition in their children. The existential wounds were painfully salted by our putative helping professions. Clara Park, mother of an autistic child, once described, "a kind of pain that only those can understand who have lived it, an assault on the most fundamental of animal instincts, the desire to benefit the young creatures one has brought into the world" ( 1 ). This book expresses that pain. It unfolds against a background of now-discredited etiological theories and their effects on a mother crazed with the stressors of incomprehensible behaviors, controversial professional advice, minimal support, and irrational guilt. She rages against child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and charges him with "a humanitarian crime" in his accusations of maternal rejection. Here is a devoted, loving mother who yearns to interact with a child incapable of interacting. Her agonized attempts to cope with his frantic insistence on sameness of objects and rituals, his perseverating behaviors, and his frustrated head banging are graphically portrayed. Melanie desperately tries to understand Daniel's inexpressible needs, to please him, to stop his uncontrollable tantrums, and at the same time not to shortchange the normal sibling vying for her attention.Considering all this, the author cleverly depicts the parents as the classic duo of overinvolved mother and distant father, who have dual family histories of human losses and clinical depression. Reflective of too many case histories, we are offered rich but irrelevant psychodynamic material with no evident specificity for the diagnosis in question. This is real-life stuff.After multiple assessments and trials, Melanie finally discovers a firmly dedicated behavioral therapist. Daniel learns how to speak and even play with others, and the mother's choice is vindicated. We have seen this mother in the clinic and the academic literature. She refuses to accept guarded prognoses, pesters professionals for reassurances they cannot give, reads widely, tries every conceivable traditional and nontraditional therapy, and essentially devotes her life to seeking an elusive cure. She is an annoyance, a royal pain to staff. Treasure her. In her obsessive commitment and zealous search, she just might find the resources that open a life for her child.Dr. Lefley is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.Reference1. Park CC: You Are Not Alone: Understanding and Dealing With Mental Illness. Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1976Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 57Issue 12 December, 2006Pages 1823-1823PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2006 Volume 57 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2006 Published in print 1 December 2006

Differential Effects of Rumination and Dysphoria on the Inhibition of Irrelevant Emotional Material: Evidence from a Negative Priming Task

Rumination has been linked to a heightened vulnerability for the development of depression. However, it still remains unclear which cognitive processes underlie individual differences in rumination. The present study investigates whether deficits in the inhibition of irrelevant emotional stimuli in working memory are related to individual differences in ruminative responses to negative mood states and negative life events. Using the Response Style Questionnaire (RSQ), high and low scorers’ performance in a negative affective priming task in which participants were asked for self-referential judgments was evaluated. The results show significant inhibition for emotional words in the participants who scored low on the RSQ but no inhibition for emotional words in the participants who scored high on the RSQ. These group differences remained significant when controlling for current depression scores suggesting that irrespective of differences in depressive symptomatology, rumination and inhibitory dysfunctions are closely related.

Disruption of order information by irrelevant items: A serial recognition paradigm

Irrelevant speech effect (ISE) is defined as a decrement in visually presented digit-list short-term memory performance due to exposure to irrelevant auditory material. Perhaps the most successful theoretical explanation of the effect is the changing state hypothesis. This hypothesis explains the effect in terms of confusion between amodal serial order cues, and represents a view based on the interference caused by the processing of similar order information of the visual and auditory materials. An alternative view suggests that the interference occurs as a consequence of the similarity between the visual and auditory contents of the stimuli. An important argument for the former view is the observation that ISE is almost exclusively observed in tasks that require memory for serial order. However, most short-term memory tasks require that both item and order information be retained in memory. An ideal task to investigate the sensitivity of maintenance of serial order to irrelevant speech would be one that calls upon order information but not item information. One task that is particularly suited to address this issue is serial recognition. In a typical serial recognition task, a list of items is presented and then probed by the same list in which the order of two adjacent items has been transposed. Due to the re-presentation of the encoding string, serial recognition requires primarily the serial order to be maintained while the content of the presented items is deemphasized. In demonstrating a highly significant ISE of changing versus steady-state auditory items in a serial recognition task, the present finding lends support for and extends previous empirical findings suggesting that irrelevant speech has the potential to interfere with the coding of the order of the items to be memorized.

Tools for Supporting Implementation Decisions of Intelligent Transportation System

Planners and engineers may consider both conventional capacity improvements and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to address transportation problems. Examples of ITS include freeway service patrols, advanced vehicle location systems, and certain elements of employee transit pass programs, each with various advantages. Details of a system to help planners and engineers make informed decisions about ITS deployment are provided. ITS Decision is designed to provide comprehensive information about state-of-the-art ITS technologies in a relevant form—the user can access desired information without sifting through irrelevant material. In addition, ITS Decision offers innovative tools to help users identify ITS appropriate for particular transportation problems. An expert system queries the user about specific conditions, diagnoses the problem, and suggests ITS remedies. The case-based reasoning tool lets users match historical cases that are most similar and see the effects. Given the still limited penetr...

Tools for Supporting Implementation Decisions of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Planners and engineers may consider both conventional capacity improvements and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to address transportation problems. Examples of ITS include freeway service patrols, advanced vehicle location systems, and certain elements of employee transit pass programs, each with various advantages. Details of a system to help planners and engineers make informed decisions about ITS deployment are provided. ITS Decision is designed to provide comprehensive information about state-of-the-art ITS technologies in a relevant form—the user can access desired information without sifting through irrelevant material. In addition, ITS Decision offers innovative tools to help users identify ITS appropriate for particular transportation problems. An expert system queries the user about specific conditions, diagnoses the problem, and suggests ITS remedies. The case-based reasoning tool lets users match historical cases that are most similar and see the effects. Given the still limited penetration of ITS into appropriate settings, the expert system and case-based reasoning tools are meant to stimulate greater deployment of promising technologies in localities that have not adopted such systems.

Inhibiting Factors Affecting Teachers’ Implementation of the KBSM (Revised) English Language Curriculum

This paper aims to discuss teachers’ degree of implementation of the KBSM (Revised) English Language Curriculum, introduced in 2003. It also sets to highlight the inhibiting factors that had impeded teachers’ implementation of the Skills Specifications or activities suggested in the Huraian Sukatan Pelajaran (HSP) Bahasa Inggeris Tingkatan Empat of the new curriculum. Firstly, the author finds that about 60 percent of the teachers obtained only a medium degree of implementation for 18 out of the 22 Skills Specifications. Secondly, the author concludes that among the prominent factors that had inhibited teachers’ implementation of the KBSM (Revised) English language curriculum in Malaysian classrooms were too many components of the new curriculum, hence leading to lack of understanding of the curriculum, lack of in-service training, time constraints and finally inadequate and irrelevant teaching materials.

Developing the injury prevention and safety promotion thesaurus, international English edition: An interdisciplinary tool for indexing and searching for research literature. Progress report 1

Introduction: Research relevant to injury prevention and safety promotion (IPSP) is conducted within more than 30 disciplines. A thesaurus under development identifies and clarifies important IPSP concepts from these disciplines and standardizes their corresponding terms. The primary function of the IPSP thesaurus will be as an indexing and search tool so that users can conduct online searches with satisfactory completeness but with a minimum amount of irrelevant material. Without this cross-disciplinary thesaurus, researchers may miss relevant information in parallel or disparate fields, which in turn may lead them to recreate information already developed or to miss important connections that could advance each discipline. Methods: The five-year development process involves (1) gathering candidate concepts and their terms by examining existing thesauri and glossaries, reviewing the archives of 30 professional journals, and analyzing search terms used by visitors to the SafetyLit website; (2) compiling the terms for IPSP-related concepts into a list with a categorical hierarchy; (3) convening panels of experts to advise the process and (4) publishing the final print and electronic versions of the thesaurus. Progress: This paper describes the overall project and its progress so far. We are currently working on compiling the structured list (step 2). To date, more than 8800 IPSP-related terms have been selected for inclusion. These terms are being defined and placed into a suitable taxonomic hierarchy created for this project. The paper also calls for additional expert panel member volunteers to provide their input.

Many scattered bones do not a skeleton make

The vertebrate skeleton is an amazing organ system. It pleases one by its exquisite architectural and engineering beauty. It impresses by its strength and remarkable adaptability. It is a veritable beehive of cellular activities: it is constantly being remodeled by the concerted action of bone-

A new customized document categorization scheme using rough membership

One of the problems that plague document ranking is the inherent ambiguity, which arises due to the nuances of natural language. Though two documents may contain the same set of words, their relevance may be very different to a single user, since the context of the words usually determines the relevance of a document. Context of a document is very difficult to model mathematically other than through user preferences. Since it is difficult to perceive all possible user interests a priori and install filters for the same at the server side, we propose a rough-set-based document filtering scheme which can be used to build customized filters at the user end. The documents retrieved by a traditional search engine can then be filtered automatically by this agent and the user is not flooded with a lot of irrelevant material. A rough-set-based classificatory analysis is used to learn the user's bias for a category of documents. This is then used to filter out irrelevant documents for the user. To do this we have proposed the use of novel rough membership functions for computing the membership of a document to various categories.

Putting Things Graphically

READERS who pay attention to the Tips for Readers of Research that have appeared here won't have heard much from me about graphs except for Try to see through graphs. By this mean that graphs don't always show what the graphers say they do. The most notorious recent example of a misleading graph is the one produced by the U.S. Department of Education that plots National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores against total federal spending on education. This graph was taken apart by Howard Wainer and Daniel Koretz in the Fall 2003 issue of Chance. And in March 2004 dealt with it in this column. Wainer, formerly with ETS and now with the National Board of Medical Examiners, produces a column for Chance each month titled Revelations. That's also the title of his 1997 book (reprinted in 2000 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), which highly recommend. Visual Revelations is itself a revelation. It begins humorously with Wainer presenting some of his early graphical failures, then moving to a chapter titled How to Display Data Badly. A graph is bad if it calls too much attention to itself. Wainer puts it this way: When looking at a good graph, your response should never be 'What a great graph!' but 'What interesting data!' A graph that calls attention to itself pictorially is almost surely a failure. Indeed, the graph that some people consider the best ever drawn looks at first like a squiggly mess. It shows a map that begins at the Russia/Poland border and ends at Moscow. On this map is displayed the size of Napoleon's army as it begins his Russian Campaign. The graphist, Charles Joseph Minard, created a swath using one-sixth of a millimeter to represent each 10,000 men. Thus the width of the swath reflects the size of the army. Minard tracks on the map the changing size of the army over the 1812-13 campaign. Napoleon entered Russia with 422,000 men, but the army quickly begins to dwindle, and so the swath becomes thinner. By the time Napoleon reaches Moscow, only 100,000 men remain. At this point, the swath changes color and reverses direction, reflecting Napoleon's retreat. By the time the army reaches the Polish border, it contains a mere 10,000 men. The reader sees the size of the army at the start of the campaign and at the end at precisely the same point on the map. The impact is stunning. The fat swath at the beginning of the campaign has, by the end, shrunk to barely the width of a single stroke of a pen. But a lot of graphs are bad. Wainer claims there are three ways of displaying data badly: not showing enough data, showing the data inaccurately, and obfuscating the data. Another graphics theorist, Edward Tufte, has created the data density index, which he defines as the number of numbers per square inch. Wainer states that this readily calculated index is surprisingly informative about the quality of the figure, and he presents graphs depicting a data density range from .1 to 54. Graphs with low data density often contain irrelevant material to make them more attention-grabbing. Wainer, after Tufte, calls this material chartjunk, and it can consist of hard-to-read fonts, moire shading, pseudo 3-D, artificial color, hype, or some combination of all these components. One can check for chartjunk in part by calculating the data- to-ink ratio. Good graphs have lots of data and contain little ink not relevant to those data. A good example of hiding data with chartjunk is the graph show in Figure 1. Supposedly, this graph from an actual NAEP item portrays a comparison between projected consumption of coal and other power sources, but it so obfuscates the information it contains that it led Wainer to ask, What is it testing? He would be sympathetic to a student who picked answer E: I don't know. In his redrawn line graph (Figure 2), the answer is immediately clear. As a final revelation of how difficult it is to read the original, it confused Wainer himself: one of the data points in Wainer's redraw is wrong! …

Characterization of 4 Cupressus arizonica extracts using different solvents

Rationale Cypress spp. pollen induced pollinosis is increasing worldwide. The objective of this study was to characterize 4 Cupressus arizonica extracts using different solvents and in vivo and in vitro techniques. Methods Commercially available Cupressus arizonica pollen was used to prepare 4 types of extracts extracts. Extract A was extracted in PBS (0.01M); extract B in ammonium bicarbonate (40 mM); extract C, in ammonium bicarbonate (40 mM), followed by precipitation with ammonium sulfate; and extract D consisted of the supernatant obtained after the centrifugation of extract C. All extracts were characterized by SDS-PAGE and immunoblot. Cup a 1 content was measured by scanning densitometry. Thirty individuals were skin tested with the 4 extracts at 2 mg/ml of freeze-dried material. Specific IgE was evaluated by direct ELISA and immunoblots. Polysaccharide content was evaluated by the Anthrone method. Results The diagnosis capacity of extract C was better than of extracts A, B and D. All skin prick tests were negative with extract D. Extract C had the highest protein and major allergen content and induced greater wheal sizes than the other extracts (p<0.05). Cup a 1 content was 7.2, 14.1 and 23.1 μg/mg of freeze-dried material in extracts A, B and C, respectively. No differences were found in the polysaccharide content in these extracts. Conclusions The increase in the protein and major allergen content and the removal of irrelevant material produces a better extract for the in vivo and in vitro diagnosis of C. arizonica induced respiratory allergies.

교육과정의 대안으로서 교육소재의 운용 방안 탐구

Education is a human subjective activity. So it is necessary to understand educational materials in the light of voluntary activities of human being. As the existing curriculum has limits in investing these aspects, this study intends to suggest an alternative. The limits of present curriculum are such as pre -establishment of educational objectives, content -centeredness, objectiveness， and interdisciplinary approach. Generally speaking, these imply that the present curriculum has limitations. Accordingly, the present curriculum is not enough to explain human as an active being who participates in educational activities earnestly. The education -centered intrinsic principles intends to understand education as a subjective activity process which improves human experiential world. So this study approaches educational materials from these perspectives. First, this study conceptualized educational materials from the new perspectives and examined critically the traditional curriculum models. Second，this research suggested the methods of selecting educational materials following the scope. Finally, this research suggested the methods of arranging educational materials following the sequence. The results drawn from this research are as follows; First, the educational materials are defined as media to have man to experience higher realities of education. The conditions of educational materials are intrinsic value, structure or organization, explicitness and tacitness，and the possibility of renewal. Second, the components of selecting educational materials are variousness, rejection of irrelevant materials，and the historical developmental process of materials. Third, the standards of arranging educational materials are the level of the learner, balance, and the optimal amount of materials. This study is in the preliminary step of the new educational research orientation. But this research intends to have an autonomous self -regulating discipline of education. So further studies are needed in this field.