Nancy A. Nussmeier, MD‡ All of us make mistakes. The nature of being human is to err. John Nance, speaking at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists (SCA) 29th Annual Meeting (April 22, 2007, Montreal, Canada) during the Flawless Operative Cardiovascular Unified Systems (FOCUS) initiative opening address noted, “although individuals may make mistakes, it is possible for teams to be fla...

Tobacco smoking or nicotine administration on its own can influence cognitive task performance. This study examined the effects of acute nicotine administration on verbal task performance and a physiological index of arousal. Healthy non-smoking participants received either a 2 mg sublingual nicotine tablet or placebo. Participants next completed various verbal tasks while heart rate recordings...

At the 50 th anniversary of the formation of the International Federation for Information Processing the simple fact that national economies and international commerce alike have become totally dependent upon the reliable and secure operation of national and global information infrastructures has been accepted. Moreover, the realization that societies are moving towards so-called " digital econ...

People often talk to themselves using the first-person pronoun (I), but they also talk to themselves as if they are speaking to someone else, using the second-person pronoun (You). Yet, the relative behavioral control achieved by I and You self-talk remains unknown. The current research was designed to examine the potential behavioral advantage of using You in self-talk and the role of attitude...

This paper describes two experiments using a masked priming method with 60 ms SOA. In the first experiment, the task was an alphabetical decision. The stimuli were isolated letters or non-alphabetical symbols, preceded by a similar or different prime, while the primes were scaled down or 180° rotated. Response times to letters revealed priming effects for both prime transformations. In the seco...

words (only verbal code) (Paivio et al., 1968; Paivio, 1969). Yet, in a study from our lab (Hamilton and Rajaram, 2001) we found that on implicit tests such as word fragment completion (_ t r _ _ b _ r _ _) and implicit general knowledge test (what fruit wears its seeds on its skin?), there was an equivalent 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 Free recall Explicit GK Implicit GK Type of task P ro po rt i...

Objective: To identify features of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) associated with Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathology. A related objective was to determine whether logopenic PPA is a clinical marker for AD. Methods: A total of 139 prospectively enrolled participants with a root diagnosis of PPA constituted the reference set. Those with autopsy or biomarker evidence of AD, and who had been ...

Reflecting on the past is often a critical ingredient for successful learning. The current research investigated how counterfactual thinking, reflecting on how prior experiences might have been different, motivates effective learning from these previous experiences. Specifically, we explored how the structure of counterfactual reflection – their additive (‘‘If only I had”) versus subtractive (‘...

Murray, Holmes, and Collins’ [Murray, Holmes, and Collins (2006) Optimizing assurance: The risk regulation system in relationships. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 641–666] interpersonal risk regulation model posits that people cope with threats to their romantic relationships by prioritizing self-protection goals over connectedness goals. The current paper tests whether these relationship-specifi...

This study investigated the application of the self-generation effect to enhance the recognition and retention of Blissymbols in persons with severe aphasia. A 2X2X3 factorial design of two treatment types (self-generation and non-generation) was used to teach two sets of Blissymbols. These were administered during three training days, between which were withdrawal periods of one day and seven ...