The effects of age, enactment, and cue-action relatedness on memory for intentions in the Virtual Week task

The current study investigated the influence of encoding modality and cue-action relatedness on prospective memory (PM) performance in young and older adults using a modified version of the Virtual Week task. Participants encoded regular and irregular intentions either verbally or by physically performing the action during encoding. For half of the intentions there was a close semantic relation between the retrieval cue and the intended action, while for the remaining intentions the cue and action were semantically unrelated. For irregular tasks, both age groups showed superior PM for related intentions compared to unrelated intentions in both encoding conditions. While older adults retrieved fewer irregular intentions than young adults after verbal encoding, there was no age difference following enactment. Possible mechanisms of enactment and relatedness effects are discussed in the context of current theories of event-based PM.

Nostalgia, music and the television past revisited in American dreams

The 1960s-set NBC family drama American Dreams presents not just the recent American past but its musical television as well. This paper examines how the show’s recreation of and interaction with the music show American Bandstand ties together the divergent experiences of a turbulent decade. American Dreams’ reshooting and appropriation of original broadcast footage is intricately interwoven with dramatic action allowing for new layers of commentary and meaning to be read across the music and image relationship. Through intercutting and juxtaposition, its use of music performance goes beyond the regressive recycling of images of nostalgia, as critiqued by Jameson and other theorists of postmodernity, to engage political and social debates through a complex web of reference, reproduction and commentary, presenting a politicised reading of the 1960s that problematises these charges of nostalgia texts as apolitical and ‘historicist’.

School effectiveness and the displacement of equity discourses in education

An essential aspect of school effectiveness theory is the shift from the social to the organisational context, from the macro- to the micro-culture. The school is represented largely as a bounded institution, set apart, but also in a precarious relationship with the broader social context. It is ironic that at a time when social disadvantage appears to be increasing in Britain and elsewhere, school effectiveness theory places less emphasis on poverty, deprivation and social exclusion. Instead, it places more emphasis on organisational factors such as professional leadership, home/school partnerships, the monitoring of academic progress, shared vision and goals. In this article, the authors evaluate the extent to which notions of effectiveness have displaced concerns about equity in theories of educational change. They explore the extent to which the social structures of gender, ethnicity, sexualities, special needs, social class, poverty and other historical forms of inequality have been incorporated into or distorted and excluded from effectiveness thinking.

The effect of environmental change on human migration

The influence of the environment and environmental change is largely unrepresented in standard theories of migration, whilst recent debates on climate change and migration focus almost entirely on displacement and perceive migration to be a problem. Drawing on an increasing evidence base that has assessed elements of the influence of the environment on migration, this paper presents a new framework for understanding the effect of environmental change on migration. The framework identifies five families of drivers which affect migration decisions: economic, political, social, demographic and environmental drivers. The environment drives migration through mechanisms characterised as the availability and reliability of ecosystem services and exposure to hazard. Individual migration decisions and flows are affected by these drivers operating in combination, and the effect of the environment is therefore highly dependent on economic, political, social and demographic context. Environmental change has the potential to affect directly the hazardousness of place. Environmental change also affects migration indirectly, in particular through economic drivers, by changing livelihoods for example, and political drivers, through affecting conflicts over resources, for example. The proposed framework, applicable to both international and internal migration, emphasises the role of human agency in migration decisions, in particular the linked role of family and household characteristics on the one hand, and barriers and facilitators to movement on the other in translating drivers into actions. The framework can be used to guide new research, assist with the evaluation of policy options, and provide a context for the development of scenarios representing a range of plausible migration futures.

Variations in the mainstreaming of sustainability: a case study approach

The construction sector has a major role to play in delivering the transition to a low carbon economy and in contributing to sustainable development; however, integrating sustainability into everyday business remains a major challenge for the sector. This research explores the experience of three large construction and engineering consultancy firms in mainstreaming sustainability. The aim of the paper is to identify and explain variations in firm level strategies for mainstreaming sustainability. The three cases vary in the way in which sustainability is ramed – as a problem of risk, business opportunity or culture – and in its location within the firm. The research postulates that the mainstreaming of sustainability is not the uniform linear process often articulated in theories of strategic change and management, but varies with the dominant organisational culture and history of each firm. he paper concludes with a reflection on the implications of this analysis for management theories and for firm level strategies.

Fundamental deficits of auditory perception in Wernicke’s aphasia

Objective: This work investigates the nature of the comprehension impairment in Wernicke’s aphasia, by examining the relationship between deficits in auditory processing of fundamental, non-verbal acoustic stimuli and auditory comprehension. Wernicke’s aphasia, a condition resulting in severely disrupted auditory comprehension, primarily occurs following a cerebrovascular accident (CVA) to the left temporo-parietal cortex. Whilst damage to posterior superior temporal areas is associated with auditory linguistic comprehension impairments, functional imaging indicates that these areas may not be specific to speech processing but part of a network for generic auditory analysis. Methods: We examined analysis of basic acoustic stimuli in Wernicke’s aphasia participants (n = 10) using auditory stimuli reflective of theories of cortical auditory processing and of speech cues. Auditory spectral, temporal and spectro-temporal analysis was assessed using pure tone frequency discrimination, frequency modulation (FM) detection and the detection of dynamic modulation (DM) in “moving ripple” stimuli. All tasks used criterion-free, adaptive measures of threshold to ensure reliable results at the individual level. Results: Participants with Wernicke’s aphasia showed normal frequency discrimination but significant impairments in FM and DM detection, relative to age- and hearing-matched controls at the group level (n = 10). At the individual level, there was considerable variation in performance, and thresholds for both frequency and dynamic modulation detection correlated significantly with auditory comprehension abilities in the Wernicke’s aphasia participants. Conclusion: These results demonstrate the co-occurrence of a deficit in fundamental auditory processing of temporal and spectrotemporal nonverbal stimuli in Wernicke’s aphasia, which may have a causal contribution to the auditory language comprehension impairment Results are discussed in the context of traditional neuropsychology and current models of cortical auditory processing.

Psychophysics of emotion: the QUEST for emotional attention

To investigate the mechanisms involved in automatic processing of facial expressions, we used the QUEST procedure to measure the display durations needed to make a gender decision on emotional faces portraying fearful, happy, or neutral facial expressions. In line with predictions of appraisal theories of emotion, our results showed greater processing priority of emotional stimuli regardless of their valence. Whereas all experimental conditions led to an averaged threshold of about 50 ms, fearful and happy facial expressions led to significantly less variability in the responses than neutral faces. Results suggest that attention may have been automatically drawn by the emotion portrayed by face targets, yielding more informative perceptions and less variable responses. The temporal resolution of the perceptual system (expressed by the thresholds) and the processing priority of the stimuli (expressed by the variability in the responses) may influence subjective and objective measures of awareness, respectively.

Are clinical documents optimised for patient safety? A critical analysis of patient safety outcomes using the EDA error model

Iatrogenic errors and patient safety in clinical processes are an increasing concern. The quality of process information in hardcopy or electronic form can heavily influence clinical behaviour and decision making errors. Little work has been undertaken to assess the safety impact of clinical process planning documents guiding the clinical actions and decisions. This paper investigates the clinical process documents used in elective surgery and their impact on latent and active clinical errors. Eight clinicians from a large health trust underwent extensive semi- structured interviews to understand their use of clinical documents, and their perceived impact on errors and patient safety. Samples of the key types of document used were analysed. Theories of latent organisational and active errors from the literature were combined with the EDA semiotics model of behaviour and decision making to propose the EDA Error Model. This model enabled us to identify perceptual, evaluation, knowledge and action error types and approaches to reducing their causes. The EDA error model was then used to analyse sample documents and identify error sources and controls. Types of knowledge artefact structures used in the documents were identified and assessed in terms of safety impact. This approach was combined with analysis of the questionnaire findings using existing error knowledge from the literature. The results identified a number of document and knowledge artefact issues that give rise to latent and active errors and also issues concerning medical culture and teamwork together with recommendations for further work.

Music and Metaphor

Peter Kivy’s contour theory provides a promising explanation of the way we describe instrumental music as expressive of emotions. I argue that if, unlike Kivy, we emphasise the metaphorical character of such descriptions, the contour theory, as a strategy for unpacking such metaphors, can be defended convincingly against common objections. This approach is more satisfactory than those of Scruton and Peacocke, who make much of metaphorical experiences, but leave the underlying metaphors unexplained. Moreover, it gives the contour theory a wider scope than Kivy intended, for even very specific narrative descriptions of music in non-musical terms are perfectly legitimate as long as they are presented, and justified, as metaphors, that is, as mere comparisons, rather than as interpretative claims about the music’s actual contents.

Understanding the effects of anesthetic agents on the EEG through neural field theory

Anesthetic and analgesic agents act through a diverse range of pharmacological mechanisms. Existing empirical data clearly shows that such "microscopic" pharmacological diversity is reflected in their "macroscopic" effects on the human electroencephalogram (EEG). Based on a detailed mesoscopic neural field model we theoretically posit that anesthetic induced EEG activity is due to selective parametric changes in synaptic efficacy and dynamics. Specifically, on the basis of physiologically constrained modeling, it is speculated that the selective modification of inhibitory or excitatory synaptic activity may differentially effect the EEG spectrum. Such results emphasize the importance of neural field theories of brain electrical activity for elucidating the principles whereby pharmacological agents effect the EEG. Such insights will contribute to improved methods for monitoring depth of anesthesia using the EEG.

Content validation for level of use of feature rich systems: a Delphi study of electronic medical records systems

Introduction. Feature usage is a pre-requisite to realising the benefits of investments in feature rich systems. We propose that conceptualising the dependent variable 'system use' as 'level of use' and specifying it as a formative construct has greater value for measuring the post-adoption use of feature rich systems. We then validate the content of the construct as a first step in developing a research instrument to measure it. The context of our study is the post-adoption use of electronic medical records (EMR) by primary care physicians. Method. Initially, a literature review of the empirical context defines the scope based on prior studies. Having identified core features from the literature, they are further refined with the help of experts in a consensus seeking process that follows the Delphi technique. Results.The methodology was successfully applied to EMRs, which were selected as an example of feature rich systems. A review of EMR usage and regulatory standards provided the feature input for the first round of the Delphi process. A panel of experts then reached consensus after four rounds, identifying ten task-based features that would be indicators of level of use. Conclusions. To study why some users deploy more advanced features than others, theories of post-adoption require a rich formative dependent variable that measures level of use. We have demonstrated that a context sensitive literature review followed by refinement through a consensus seeking process is a suitable methodology to validate the content of this dependent variable. This is the first step of instrument development prior to statistical confirmation with a larger sample.

Effects of second language on cognition in English users of L2 Japanese

It is now established that certain cognitive processes such as categorisation are tightly linked to the concepts encoded in language. Recent studies have shown that bilinguals with languages that differ in their concepts may show a shift in their cognition towards the L2 pattern primarily as a function of their L2 proficiency. This research has so far focused predominantly on L2 users who started learning the L2 in childhood or early puberty. The current study asks whether similar effects can be found in adult L2 learners. English speakers of L2 Japanese were given an object classification task involving real physical objects, and an online classification task involving artificial novel objects. Results showed a shift towards the L2 pattern, indicating that some degree of cognitive plasticity exists even when a second language is acquired later in life. These results have implications for theories of L2 acquisition and bilingualism, and contribute towards our understanding of the nature of the relationship between language and cognition in the L2 user’s mind.

‘Due libertie and proportiond equalitie’: Milton, democracy, and the republican tradition

John Milton’s political thought has been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways. This article argues that he should be seen as a classical republican, and locates key aspects of his political thought within an ancient Greek discourse critical of democracy or extreme democracy. Milton was clearly familiar with the ancient texts expounding this critique, and he himself deployed both the arguments and the characteristic discourse of the anti-democratic thinkers across the span of his writing. This vision of politics emphasized the rightly-ordered soul of the masculine republican citizen, in contrast to the unruly passions seen both in tyrants and in the democratic rabble.

The effect of the national setting on employment practice: the case of downsizing

Although there is now a sizeable body of academic literature that tries to explain cross-country differences in terms of corporate control, capital market development, investor protection and politics, there is as yet very little literature on the degrees of protection accorded to other corporate stakeholders such as employees, based on a systematic comparison of firm level evidence. We find that both theories of legal origin and the varieties of capitalism approach are poor predictors of the relative propensity of firms to make redundancies in different settings. However, the political orientation of the government in place and even more so the nature of the electoral system are relatively good explanators of this propensity. In other words, political structures and outcomes matter more than more rigid institutional features such as legal origin. We explore the reasons for this, drawing out the implications for both theory and practice.