In the present study, we examined whether perceptual learning methods can be used to improve performance of older individuals. Subjects performed a texture discrimination task in the peripheral visual field and a letter discrimination task in central vision. The SOA threshold was derived by presenting a mask following the stimuli. Older subjects (age greater than 65 years) were either trained f...

Quercetin is a flavonoid which activates oxidative metabolism. Quercetin may reduce weight gain by decreasing feed efficiency. The present study aims to evaluate weight gain, caloric intake and feed efficiency in exercised and sedentary rats supplemented with quercetin. Wistar rats were divided into four groups: quercetin-exercise training (QT), quercetin-sedentary (QS), placebo-exercise traini...

The Terabyte Track explores how retrieval and evaluation techniques can scale to terabyte-sized collections, examining both efficiency and effectiveness issues. TREC 2005 is the second year for the track. The track was introduced as part of TREC 2004, with a single adhoc retrieval task. That year, 17 groups submitted 70 runs in total. This year, the track consisted of three experimental tasks: ...

We investigate the effects of leadership in a four player weak-link game. A weaklink game is a coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria. Because the more efficient equilibria involve a degree of strategic uncertainty groups typically find it difficult to coordinate on more efficient equilibria. We wanted to see whether leadership by example, in the form of one player acting...

OBJECTIVE To test the hypotheses that 1) coronary artery disease patients with lower aerobic fitness exhibit a lower ventilatory efficiency and 2) coronary artery disease patients with lower initial aerobic fitness exhibit greater improvements in ventilatory efficiency with aerobic exercise training. METHOD A total of 123 patients (61.0±0.7 years) with coronary artery disease were divided acc...

The literature on repetition processing reveals an intriguing paradox between the particular salience of repetitions, which makes them easy to learn, and a tendency to avoid them when generating sequences. The aim of this experiment was to study the extent to which children can learn to produce these avoided behaviours by means of an artificial grammar paradigm using generation tests with impli...

Although online focus groups are emerging as a worthwhile methodological approach for qualitative researchers, reporting has been constrained in several ways. The majority of studies report asynchronous groups, whereas others employ synchronous exchanges, the efficacy of which with young people has seldom been explored. Considering the popularity of the Internet as a communication tool for youn...

This paper describes the use of focus groups as a data-gathering tool, in both theoretical and practical terms. Calder's discussion of focus groups is presented as the basis of the theory, and the marketing study conducted by the Midcontinental Region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine serves as the backdrop to highlight some of the practical aspects of using this qualitative data...

Although consumer opportunistic behavior has drawn attention from managers and scholars for a long time, a special context of two-sided market has been ignored. A multi-stage research program, comprising in depth interviews (Study 1) and three experimental studies (Studies 2, 3, 4), explored opportunistic claiming during service guarantee. The main characteristics of two-sided market (consumer,...

This study generalizes the test performed by Simar and Zelenyuk (2007) to examine differences in the technical efficiency among (Formula presented.) groups within an industry (where (Formula presented.)). For this purpose, the (Formula presented.) groups are divided into pairs and each group is compared with all other (Formula presented.) groups. The (Formula presented.) groups can then be clas...