RATIONALE The relationship between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cognitive impairment in leading to disability has not been characterized. OBJECTIVES We aimed to investigate the prevalence and cumulative incidence of disability among adults with and without COPD and the association of COPD and cognitive impairment with disability. METHODS We analyzed 2006-2008 waves of th...

Failure to address extreme environments constraints at the human-computer interaction level may lead to the commission of critical and potentially fatal errors. This experimental study addresses gaps in our current theoretical understanding of the impact of±Gz accelerations and field dependency independency on task performance in human-computer interaction. It investigates the effects of ±Gz ac...

What does the capacity to consent to treatment entail and what factors influence it? To date, most research has focussed on individual factors that impair capacity to consent to treatment, such as intelligence, cognitive capacity and symptoms of mental illness. In this presentation, I want to explore the social and interpersonal factors that influence capacity to consent. I discuss the complexi...

Although many responses to odorous stimuli are mediated without olfactory information being consciously processed, some olfactory behaviors require conscious information processing. I will here contrast situations in which olfactory information is processed consciously to situations in which it is processed non-consciously. This contrastive analysis reveals that conscious information processing...

In behavioral studies on sentence comprehension, much evidence indicates that shorter dependencies are preferred over longer dependencies, and that longer dependencies incur a greater processing cost. However, it remains uncertain which of the various steps involved in the processing of long-distance dependencies is responsible for the increased cost of longer dependencies. Previous sentence co...

OBJECTIVES to assess whether measures of cognitive and physical function can explain differences in observed and healthcare resource group (HRG) predicted length of stay for patients presenting with six target conditions at admission. DESIGN prospective observational study. SETTING three East Kent district general hospitals. PARTICIPANTS One thousand nine hundred and forty-two consecutive...

OBJECTIVE to investigate dependency and general health status of a cohort of older people admitted to residential or nursing homes for long-term care. METHOD we assessed 308 people aged over 65 years within 2 weeks of admission for long-term care to one of 30 nursing or residential homes in north-west England. Dependency was assessed using the Barthel activities of daily living index and the ...