Judgment Performance Research Articles

Odors hedonic judgment in patients with schizophrenia. Influence of negative symptoms and β-endorphin levels

IntroductionThe relationship between olfactory and emotional processing is an area of increasing interest in schizophrenia research.ObjectivesOlfactory identification deficits are well described in schizophrenia while the results for pleasantness ratings remain unclear.AimsEvaluation of odor identification and hedonic judgment related to severity of negative symptoms and β-endorphin concentration.MethodsFifty outpatients with schizophrenia were included in the study: 25 with negative symptoms (PN) and 25 without predominant negative symptoms (P). They were compared with 23 healthy individuals. In all study groups University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT) and odor hedonic evaluation were performed. Clinical symptoms severity was evaluated using PANSS. Plasma concentrations of β-endorphin were assayed in all participants.ResultsPN made more odor identification errors than controls (P = 0.000) and P sample (P = 0.001). Hedonic judgments of unpleasant odors were significantly more pleasant in PN sample than in P (P = 0.03) and controls (P = 0.041). PN had significantly higher concentration of β-endorphin than P sample (P = 0.014) and controls (P = 0.009). No relationship between β-endorphin concentration and odors identification and odor hedonic judgment was found in both patient samples and controls.ConclusionsIncreased level of β-endorphin is related to predominance of negative symptoms but probably it is not involved in olfactory identification performance and hedonic judgment in schizophrenia. Patients with predominant negative symptoms revealed different pattern of pleasantness rating – they experience unpleasant odors as more pleasant. Alterations in smell identification and hedonic judgment could be differentially expressed in some subtypes of schizophrenia.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Effects on Nursing Students’ Clinical Judgment, Communication, and Skill Performance Following Debriefing using a Clinical Judgment Rubric

In this study, nursing students underwent simulation training with the aim of assessing the effects of post-simulation debriefing using a clinical judgment rubric to evaluate clinical judgment, communication, and skill performance. There were statistically significant differences between-group differences in participants’ clinical judgment and communication. However, no statistically significant difference was observed between the groups in terms of skill performance.

Performance Evaluation of MTF Peak Detection Methods by a Statistical Analysis for Phone Camera Modules

To evaluate the autofocusing performance of recent mobile phone cameras, it is necessary to determine the peak position of the center field MTF (Modulation Transfer Function), -known as the through focus MTF- of the module. However, the MTF peak position found by conventional methods deviates from the ideal position due to the focus scanning resolution of mobile phone cameras. This inaccurate peak position results in false judgements of the optical performance, leading to yield losses or customer complaints. An increase in the focus scanning resolution can address this problem, but the manufacturing UPH (Unit per Hour) level will also unfortunately increase as well, resulting in a loss of manufacturing capabilities. In this paper, several fitting models are studied to find an accurate MTF peak position within a short period of time. With an analysis of a large amount of manufacturing data, it is demonstrated that the fitting methods can reduce false judgements and simultaneously increase the capabilities of the manufacturing system.

Illusion of agency in patients with Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

The sense of agency refers to the conscious experience of authorship and control over actions.The voluntary or involuntary nature of tics, which are the hallmark of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome (GTS), is unclear. Here, we studied metacognitive processing of agency in an explicit agency task on non-medicated and medicated GTS patients compared to matched controls. In this task, the participants made judgements of control and performance after completion of a computerized game where they had to catch targets with a cursor by moving the computer mouse. The task included several conditions, where the objective control over the cursor could be normal, disrupted or artificially enhanced. We show that GTS patients, independently of medication status, based their judgments of agency predominantly on the matching between their intention and the outcome, i.e., had an illusion of agency in the task condition where their performance was artificially enhanced. Nevertheless, they recognized not to be fully in control in conditions of disrupted control. The propensity to illusions of agency was negatively correlated with global disease severity.Our findings suggest alterations of metacognition of agency in GTS patients. This illusion of agency could reflect a compensatory mechanism related to tic control, but is more likely to be related to deviant brain maturation in GTS.

Confidence Matters: Self‐efficacy Moderates the Credit that Supervisors Give to Adaptive and Proactive Role Behaviours

In complex and uncertain work environments, employees need to not only be proficient in carrying out their core duties, but also to be adaptive (able to cope and respond to unpredictable events) and proactive (able to anticipate the situation and act in a self‐directed way) in their work roles. In this study we investigate the extent to which supervisors actually give credit to adaptive and proactive role behaviours when they judge employees’ overall job performance. Drawing on attribution theory, we propose that the extent to which these role behaviours are valued by supervisors will be enhanced by employees’ confidence for relevant role behaviours. Support for these ideas is provided using data from junior doctors and their supervisors in a hospital emergency department. Adaptive role behaviours positively influenced supervisors’ judgements of overall job performance. This relationship was stronger for employees with high self‐efficacy for achieving outcomes. Engaging in proactive role behaviours while also lacking role‐breadth self‐efficacy resulted in supervisors’ giving employees less credit for their proactive role behaviours. Findings support the argument that employees’ self‐efficacy for specific role behaviours provides attributional cues about capability that modify how adaptive and proactive role behaviours are interpreted and valued.

Entrustability Scales: Outlining Their Usefulness for Competency-Based Clinical Assessment.

Meaningful residency education occurs at the bedside, along with opportunities for situated in-training assessment. A necessary component of workplace-based assessment (WBA) is the clinical supervisor, whose subjective judgments of residents' performance can yield rich and nuanced ratings but may also occasionally reflect bias. How to improve the validity of WBA instruments while simultaneously capturing meaningful subjective judgment is currently not clear. This Perspective outlines how "entrustability scales" may help bridge the gap between the assessment judgments of clinical supervisors and WBA instruments. Entrustment-based assessment evaluates trainees against what they will actually do when independent; thus, "entrustability scales"-defined as behaviorally anchored ordinal scales based on progression to competence-reflect a judgment that has clinical meaning for assessors. Rather than asking raters to assess trainees against abstract scales, entrustability scales provide raters with an assessment measure structured around the way evaluators already make day-to-day clinical entrustment decisions, which results in increased reliability. Entrustability scales help raters make assessments based on narrative descriptors that reflect real-world judgments, drawing attention to a trainee's readiness for independent practice rather than his/her deficiencies. These scales fit into milestone measurement both by allowing an individual resident to strive for independence in entrustable professional activities across the entire training period and by allowing residency directors to identify residents experiencing difficulty. Some WBA tools that have begun to use variations of entrustability scales show potential for allowing raters to produce valid judgments. This type of anchor scale should be brought into wider circulation.

View makes a difference: Presenting human figures from the back or front affects mental spatial transformations of children and adults

Previous research suggested that performance in spatial judgments involving rotated human figures is poorer if these figures are presented from the front than from the back. We further investigated this effect, controlling for visible facial information in front and back view by presenting figures' faces as profile. Children's and adults' judgments were still faster and less error prone if figures were presented from the back. Moreover, reaction times indicated that participants did not mentally rotate figures in front view. Children performed overall more poorly than adults, but there were also qualitative differences suggesting that children are more susceptible to embodiment effects than adults. This study underlines that embodiment may have differential effects in spatial transformation tasks, enhancing or impairing performance.

Calisthenics with Words: The Effect of Readability and Investor Sophistication on Investors’ Performance Judgment

Since the 1990s, the SEC has advocated for financial disclosures to be in “plain English” so that they would be more readable and informative. Past research has shown that high readability is related to more extreme investor judgments of firm performance. Processing fluency is the prevalent theory to explain this: higher readability increases the investor’s subconscious reliance on the disclosure, so positive (negative) news leads to more positive (negative) judgments. The relationship may not be so simple, though: drawing on research from cognitive psychology, I predict and find that investor financial literacy simultaneously influences investor decision-making, and that it has an interactive effect with readability. When presented with financial disclosure containing conflicting financial information, investors with higher financial literacy make more negative judgments than investors with low financial literacy when the disclosure is easy to read, but the effect becomes insignificant when the disclosure becomes difficult to read. This effect is moderated by a comprehension gap between the two investor groups. Financial literacy and readability interact to impact both how and how well the investor processes financial information.

Towards an Aesthetics of Gaelic Song Performance

Identifying criteria for the judgement of execution and performance in folk or traditional contexts presents considerable challenges. Primarily addressing the question of the presence of the body in entertainment and performance, this paper interprets various examples from Ireland and Scotland to initiate a discussion around such questions. Drawing on the ethnographic present and historical evidence from the past to argue that such matters originate in the body and that metaphors arising from traditional discourse foreground the body as a site upon which these ideas are culturally inscribed. Dancing, singing and performance in general speak to an aesthetic where the body is engaged and active, usually in the presence of others either in dance or song or in combination. The Reformation, colonialism, the rapid onset of modernity and other processes have disguised, but not eradicated, the continuity of these deeply ingrained attitudes. Modern folk aesthetics relate diachronically to the cosmological concept enech, a term meaning both ‘face’ and ‘honour’, engaging an idea situated at the interstices of aesthetics, politics and indeed, economics, within an older Gaelic worldview. The paper argues for an ethically grounded notion of aesthetic principles, capable of great transformations when executed with proper ability, skill and judgement. Although focusing on the Gaelic world, the paper suggests that such concepts also apply to other cultures beyond it.

How Not to Talk Past Each Other: The Convergence of Political Representation and Deliberation

This article proposes an analytical framework for studying in a more robust manner the co-occurrence of representation and deliberation. To avoid the pitfall of treating the concept of representation and deliberation as either mutually exclusive or fully intertwined, the framework distinguishes three key features for entangling the two-way interplay of political representation and deliberation: the context of representation, deliberative performance and representative judgement. As such, it will help us discern why representatives in varying contexts of representation resort to different deliberative performances, and how representative judgement is feasible within this backdrop. This proposal builds upon reading current theoretical re-examinations as an illustration of the convergence of the two concepts. These developments also indicate not only how representation can act as a dynamic resource for deliberation, but also how deliberation can constitute and establish representation.

Metacognition about the past and future: quantifying common and distinct influences on prospective and retrospective judgments of self-performance.

Metacognitive judgments of performance can be retrospective (such as confidence in past choices) or prospective (such as a prediction of success). Several lines of evidence indicate that these two aspects of metacognition are dissociable, suggesting they rely on distinct cues or cognitive resources. However, because prospective and retrospective judgments are often elicited and studied in separate experimental paradigms, their similarities and differences remain unclear. Here we characterize prospective and retrospective judgments of performance in the same perceptual discrimination task using repeated stimuli of constant difficulty. Using an incentive-compatible mechanism for eliciting subjective probabilities, subjects expressed their confidence in past choices together with their predictions of success in future choices. We found distinct influences on each judgment type: retrospective judgments were strongly influenced by the speed and accuracy of the immediately preceding decision, whereas prospective judgments were influenced by previous confidence over a longer time window. In contrast, global levels of confidence were correlated across judgments, indicative of a domain-general overconfidence that transcends temporal focus.

Are you sure the library is that way? Metacognitive monitoring of spatial judgments.

Many studies have examined how people recall the locations of objects in spatial layouts. However, little is known about how people monitor the accuracy of judgments based on those memories. The goal of the present experiments was to examine the effect of reference frame characteristics on metacognitive accuracy for spatial judgments. Reference frame characteristics include the alignment of one's viewpoint with the structure of the environment (allocentric alignment), direction of the target with respect to one's current viewpoint (egocentric direction), and the type of perspective used to solve the task (egocentric vs. allocentric). Participants were tested on their knowledge of a well-known location in which they had experience navigating. They were asked to orient themselves toward a particular heading and point to target landmarks from this heading. They then rated their confidence in their pointing judgments. Confidence judgments were sensitive to the effects of allocentric alignment and egocentric direction on performance. However, they underestimate the magnitude of these effects. Follow-up regression analyses indicate that confidence in individual landmarks was a stronger predictor of confidence than reference frame characteristics. Overall, the results suggest that people use reference frame features and landmark confidence when monitoring performance in directional judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record

In the same group but moving in different directions: Coordination effects in tasks with simultaneous intellective and judgmental performance criteria.

Cooperative work can seldom be meaningfully reduced to a single performance criterion. However, there is little theory regarding how groups address tasks with multiple success criteria. Generalizing from the theory of task demonstrability we offer a foundation for understanding group performance on multifaceted tasks that includes a focus on subtask performance, overall performance, and the subjective experience of group members. We predict and find that the composition of groups with respect to member priorities (i.e., having a single member that is oriented toward an intellective criterion or multiple members oriented toward a judgmental criterion) outperform groups that do not meet these composition thresholds. Groups simultaneously meeting both thresholds outperform all comparisons, however their members report a poor shared understanding of the task, less cooperation, and less desire to work in that same group in the future. This research extends the traditional group performance literature into the more complex and ecologically valid area of multicriteria performance and addresses both theoretical and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record

Clinician judgment vs formal scales for predicting intracerebral hemorrhage outcomes

To compare the performance of formal prognostic instruments vs subjective clinical judgment with regards to predicting functional outcome in patients with spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). This prospective observational study enrolled 121 ICH patients hospitalized at 5 US tertiary care centers. Within 24 hours of each patient's admission to the hospital, one physician and one nurse on each patient's clinical team were each asked to predict the patient's modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score at 3 months and to indicate whether he or she would recommend comfort measures. The admission ICH score and FUNC score, 2 prognostic scales selected for their common use in neurologic practice, were calculated for each patient. Spearman rank correlation coefficients (r) with respect to patients' actual 3-month mRS for the physician and nursing predictions were compared against the same correlation coefficients for the ICH score and FUNC score. The absolute value of the correlation coefficient for physician predictions with respect to actual outcome (0.75) was higher than that of either the ICH score (0.62, p = 0.057) or the FUNC score (0.56, p = 0.01). The nursing predictions of outcome (r = 0.72) also trended towards an accuracy advantage over the ICH score (p = 0.09) and FUNC score (p = 0.03). In an analysis that excluded patients for whom comfort care was recommended, the 65 available attending physician predictions retained greater accuracy (r = 0.73) than either the ICH score (r = 0.50, p = 0.02) or the FUNC score (r = 0.42, p = 0.004). Early subjective clinical judgment of physicians correlates more closely with 3-month outcome after ICH than prognostic scales.

What makes rubrics effective in teacher-feedback? Transparency of learning goals is not enough

This study aimed at identifying the determining factor in making teacher-given rubric feedback effective on student performance (planning experiments in science class), motivation, and calibration accuracy. In a pre–post experimental design, secondary school students (N = 120) were randomly assigned to three different variations of rubric feedback incrementally graded with respect to the quantity of included feedback information: in condition 1, the rubric was handed out to the students to make learning goals transparent (transparency information). In condition 2, the rubric as well as information on the students' actual task performance was provided (individual performance information). Condition 3 included not only the rubric and actual task performance information but also individual cues on how to proceed (individual performance improvement information). Students who received improvement information showed a significantly better performance in planning scientific experiments, perceived themselves as being more competent, and were also more accurate in their self-evaluative performance judgments. This calibration accuracy could be identified to be a partial mediator of the positive effect of rubric feedback on performance. Thus, results indicate that the crucial variable in making teachers rubric feedback effective appears to be the successful use of performance improvement information. Implications for educational research and practice are discussed.

Differential Neural Correlates Underlie Judgment of Learning and Subsequent Memory Performance.

Judgment of learning (JOL) plays a pivotal role in self-regulated learning. Although the JOLs are in general accurate, important deviations from memory performance are often reported, especially when the JOLs are made immediately after learning. Nevertheless, existing studies have not clearly dissociated the neural processes underlying subjective JOL and objective memory. In the present study, participants were asked to study a list of words that would be tested 1 day later. Immediately after learning an item, participants predicted how likely they would remember that item. Critically, the JOL was performed on only half of the studied items to avoid its contamination on subsequent memory. We found that during encoding, compared to items later judged as “will be forgotten,” those judged as “will be remembered” showed stronger activities in the default-mode network, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and posterior cingulate cortex, as well as weaker functional connectivity between the left dorsolateral PFC and the visual cortex. The exact opposite pattern was found when comparing items that were actually remembered with those that were later forgotten. These important neural dissociations between JOL and memory performance shed light on the neural mechanisms of human metamemory bias.

Perception of Hearing Aid-Processed Speech in Individuals with Late-Onset Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder.

Auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD) is a form of sensorineural hearing loss, causing severe deficits in speech perception. The perceptual problems of individuals with ANSD were attributed to their temporal processing impairment rather than to reduced audibility. This rendered their rehabilitation difficult using hearing aids. Although hearing aids can restore audibility, compression circuits in a hearing aid might distort the temporal modulations of speech, causing poor aided performance. Therefore, hearing aid settings that preserve the temporal modulations of speech might be an effective way to improve speech perception in ANSD. The purpose of the study was to investigate the perception of hearing aid-processed speech in individuals with late-onset ANSD. A repeated measures design was used to study the effect of various compression time settings on speech perception and perceived quality. Seventeen individuals with late-onset ANSD within the age range of 20-35 yr participated in the study. The word recognition scores (WRSs) and quality judgment of phonemically balanced words, processed using four different compression settings of a hearing aid (slow, medium, fast, and linear), were evaluated. The modulation spectra of hearing aid-processed stimuli were estimated to probe the effect of amplification on the temporal envelope of speech. Repeated measures analysis of variance and post hoc Bonferroni's pairwise comparisons were used to analyze the word recognition performance and quality judgment. The comparison between unprocessed and all four hearing aid-processed stimuli showed significantly higher perception using the former stimuli. Even though perception of words processed using slow compression time settings of the hearing aids were significantly higher than the fast one, their difference was only 4%. In addition, there were no significant differences in perception between any other hearing aid-processed stimuli. Analysis of the temporal envelope of hearing aid-processed stimuli revealed minimal changes in the temporal envelope across the four hearing aid settings. In terms of quality, the highest number of individuals preferred stimuli processed using slow compression time settings. Individuals who preferred medium ones followed this. However, none of the individuals preferred fast compression time settings. Analysis of quality judgment showed that slow, medium, and linear settings presented significantly higher preference scores than the fast compression setting. Individuals with ANSD showed no marked difference in perception of speech that was processed using the four different hearing aid settings. However, significantly higher preference, in terms of quality, was found for stimuli processed using slow, medium, and linear settings over the fast one. Therefore, whenever hearing aids are recommended for ANSD, those having slow compression time settings or linear amplification may be chosen over the fast (syllabic compression) one. In addition, WRSs obtained using hearing aid-processed stimuli were remarkably poorer than unprocessed stimuli. This shows that processing of speech through hearing aids might have caused a large reduction of performance in individuals with ANSD. However, further evaluation is needed using individually programmed hearing aids rather than hearing aid-processed stimuli.

Privileging Naturals Over Strivers: The Costs of the Naturalness Bias.

A preference for "naturals" over "strivers" in performance judgments was investigated to test whether the effect is generalizable across domains, as well as to ascertain any costs imposed on decision quality by favoring naturals. Despite being presented with entrepreneurs equal in achievement, participants judged the natural and his business proposal to be superior to the striver and his proposal on multiple dimensions of performance and success (Study 1a and Study 1b). These findings were extended in Study 2, which quantified the costs of the naturalness bias using conjoint analysis to measure specific decision tradeoffs. Together, these three studies show that people tend to pass over better-qualified individuals in favor of apparent naturals.

A comparison of the management of venous leg ulceration by specialist and generalist community nurses: A judgement analysis

BackgroundVenous leg ulcer management in the UK varies significantly. Judgements made by nurses contribute to this variability and it is often assumed that specialist nurses make better judgements than non-specialist nurses. This paper compares the judgements of community tissue viability specialist nurses and community generalist nurses; specifically, the ways they use clinical information and their levels of accuracy. ObjectivesTo compare specialist and non-specialist UK community nurses’ clinical information use when managing venous leg ulceration and their levels of accuracy when making diagnoses and judging the need for treatment. DesignJudgement analysis. SettingUK community and primary care nursing services. Participants18 community generalist nurses working in district (home) nursing teams and general practitioner services and 18 community tissue viability specialist nurses. MethodsData were collected in 2011 and 2012. 18 community generalist nurses and 18 community tissue viability specialist nurses made diagnostic and treatment judgements on 110 clinical scenarios and indicated their confidence in each of their judgements. Scenarios were generated from real patient cases and presented online using text and photographs. An expert panel made judgements, and reached consensus on the same scenarios. These judgements were used as a standard against which to compare the participants. Logistic regression models and correlational statistics were used to generate various indices of judgement “performance”: accuracy, consistency, confidence calibration and information use. Differences between groups of nurses with different levels of characteristics linked to expertise were explored using analysis of variance. ResultsSpecialist nurses had similar cue usage to the generalist nurses but were more accurate when making diagnostic and treatment judgements. ConclusionIt is not obvious why the tissue viability specialist nurses were more accurate. One possible reason might be the greater opportunities for ‘deliberate practice’ afforded to specialists. However, restricting aspects of practice only to specialist nurses is likely to hinder the judgement performance of generalists.

An automatic system for humanoid dance creation

Abstract The paper describes a novel approach to allow a robot to dance following musical rhythm. The proposed system generates a dance for a humanoid robot through the combination of basic movements synchronized with the music. The system made up of three parts: the extraction of features from audio file, estimation of movements through the Hidden Markov Models and, finally, the generation of dance. Starting from a set of given movements, the robot choices sequence of movements a suitable Hidden Markov Model, and synchronize them processing musical input. The proposed approach has the advantage that movement execution probabilities could be changed according evaluation of the dance execution in order to have an artificial creative system. In the same way, a choreographer could give more importance to some movements and/or exclude others, using the system as a co-creation tool. The approach has been tested on Aldebaran NAO humanoid using different genres of music, and experimentations was conduct at presence of real human dancers to have feedback of the goodness of the robot execution. Three professional judges expressed their evaluations about the following points: appropriateness of movements for a given musical genre; the precision to track the rhythm; the aesthetic impact of the whole sequence of movements; and the overall judgment of the robot performance. All the evaluations are very satisfying, and confirm that robot dance is realistic and aesthetically acceptable. The robustness and flexibility of the system allow us to embed the system in artificial creative system in future work. In the discussion we introduce some issues to pursuit this aim, using a previous proposed cognitive architecture based on needs and motivations.