The Illusion of Urgency Kennedy, Daniel R.; Porter, Andrea L.
American journal of pharmaceutical education,
10/2022, Letnik:
86, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Faculty frequently have many tasks that need to be completed on a daily basis. Prioritizing these tasks effectively can be challenging, especially considering the relative urgency and importance of ...each. Decision matrices such as the Eisenhower Matrix and the Time Management Matrix can assist individuals in categorizing tasks in order to value what is truly career building versus a distraction. It is imperative for faculty to develop strategies to address common distractors, such as email, meetings, and requests from others. Identifying tasks that are truly urgent over those that only appear to be urgent may help faculty increase their productivity and efficiency.
Bayesian empirical likelihood (BEL) models are becoming increasingly popular as an attractive alternative to fully parametric models. However, they have only recently been applied to spatial data ...analysis for small area estimation. This study considers the development of spatial BEL models using two popular conditional autoregressive (CAR) priors, namely BYM and Leroux priors. The performance of the proposed models is compared with their parametric counterparts and with existing spatial BEL models using independent Gaussian priors and generalised Moran basis priors. The models are applied to two benchmark spatial datasets, simulation study and COVID-19 data. The results indicate promising opportunities for these models to capture new insights into spatial data. Specifically, the spatial BEL models outperform the parametric spatial models when the underlying distributional assumptions of data appear to be violated.
The corpus callosum, with its ∼200 million axons, remains enigmatic in its contribution to cognition and behaviour. Agenesis of the corpus callosum is a congenital condition in which the corpus ...callosum fails to develop; such individuals exhibit localized deficits in non-literal language comprehension, humour, theory of mind and social reasoning. These findings together with parent reports suggest that behavioural and cognitive impairments in subjects with callosal agenesis may overlap with the profile of autism spectrum disorders, particularly with respect to impairments in social interaction and communication. To provide a comprehensive test of this hypothesis, we directly compared a group of 26 adults with callosal agenesis to a group of 28 adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder but no neurological abnormality. All participants had full-scale intelligence quotient scores >78 and groups were matched on age, handedness, and gender ratio. Using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule together with current clinical presentation to assess autistic symptomatology, we found that 8/26 (about a third) of agenesis subjects presented with autism. However, more formal diagnosis additionally involving recollective parent-report measures regarding childhood behaviour showed that only 3/22 met complete formal criteria for an autism spectrum disorder (parent reports were unavailable for four subjects). We found no relationship between intelligence quotient and autism symptomatology in callosal agenesis, nor evidence that the presence of any residual corpus callosum differentiated those who exhibited current autism spectrum symptoms from those who did not. Relative to the autism spectrum comparison group, parent ratings of childhood behaviour indicated children with agenesis were less likely to meet diagnostic criteria for autism, even for those who met autism spectrum criteria as adults, and even though there was no group difference in parent report of current behaviours. The findings suggest two broad conclusions. First, they support the hypothesis that congenital disruption of the corpus callosum constitutes a major risk factor for developing autism. Second, they quantify specific features that distinguish autistic behaviour associated with callosal agenesis from autism more generally. Taken together, these two findings also leverage specific questions for future investigation: what are the distal causes (genetic and environmental) determining both callosal agenesis and its autistic features, and what are the proximal mechanisms by which absence of the callosum might generate autistic symptomatology?
Impairment in social communication is one of the diagnostic hallmarks of autism spectrum disorders, and a large body of research has documented aspects of impaired social cognition in autism, both at ...the level of the processes and the neural structures involved. Yet one of the most common social communicative abilities in everyday life, the ability to judge somebody's emotion from their facial expression, has yielded conflicting findings. To investigate this issue, we used a sensitive task that has been used to assess facial emotion perception in a number of neurological and psychiatric populations. Fifteen high-functioning adults with autism and 19 control participants rated the emotional intensity of 36 faces displaying basic emotions. Every face was rated 6 times—once for each emotion category. The autism group gave ratings that were significantly less sensitive to a given emotion, and less reliable across repeated testing, resulting in overall decreased specificity in emotion perception. We thus demonstrate a subtle but specific pattern of impairments in facial emotion perception in people with autism.
► We examined whether perception of basic facial emotions is impaired in autism. ► The autism group had overall reduced selectivity in ratings of emotional facial expressions. ► In addition, there was reduced test-retest reliability in the autism group. ► Subtle yet significant abnormality exists in adults with high-functioning autism.
Several regions of the brain (including medial prefrontal cortex, rostral anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, and precuneus) are known to have high metabolic activity during rest, which is ...suppressed during cognitively demanding tasks. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this suppression of activity is observed as "deactivations," which are thought to be indicative of an interruption of the mental activity that persists during rest. Thus, measuring deactivation provides a means by which rest-associated functional activity can be quantitatively examined. Applying this approach to autism, we found that the autism group failed to demonstrate this deactivation effect. Furthermore, there was a strong correlation between a clinical measure of social impairment and functional activity within the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. We speculate that the lack of deactivation in the autism group is indicative of abnormal internally directed processes at rest, which may be an important contribution to the social and emotional deficits of autism.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) features profound social deficits but neuroimaging studies have failed to find any consistent neural signature. Here we connect these two facts by showing that ...idiosyncratic patterns of brain activation are associated with social comprehension deficits. Human participants with ASD (N = 17) and controls (N = 20) freely watched a television situation comedy (sitcom) depicting seminaturalistic social interactions ("The Office", NBC Universal) in the scanner. Intersubject correlations in the pattern of evoked brain activation were reduced in the ASD group-but this effect was driven entirely by five ASD subjects whose idiosyncratic responses were also internally unreliable. The idiosyncrasy of these five ASD subjects was not explained by detailed neuropsychological profile, eye movements, or data quality; however, they were specifically impaired in understanding the social motivations of characters in the sitcom. Brain activation patterns in the remaining ASD subjects were indistinguishable from those of control subjects using multiple multivariate approaches. Our findings link neurofunctional abnormalities evoked by seminaturalistic stimuli with a specific impairment in social comprehension, and highlight the need to conceive of ASD as a heterogeneous classification.
The amygdala plays key roles in emotion and social cognition, but how this translates to face-to-face interactions involving real people remains unknown. We found that an individual with complete ...amygdala lesions lacked any sense of personal space. Furthermore, healthy individuals showed amygdala activation upon close personal proximity. The amygdala may be required to trigger the strong emotional reactions normally following personal space violations, thus regulating interpersonal distance in humans.
Nearly half the published research in psychology is conducted with online samples, but the preponderance of these studies rely primarily on self-report measures. The current study validated data ...quality from an online sample on a novel, dynamic task by comparing performance between an in-lab and online sample on two dynamic measures of theory of mind—the ability to infer others’ mental states. Theory of mind is a cognitively complex construct that has been widely studied across multiple domains of psychology. One task was based on the show
The Office
®, and has been previously validated by the authors with in-lab samples. The second was a novel task based on the show
Nathan for You
®, which was selected to account for familiarity effects associated with
The Office.
Both tasks measured various dimensions of theory of mind (inferring beliefs, understanding motivations, detecting deception, identifying faux pas, and understanding emotions). The in-person lab samples (
N
= 144 and 177, respectively) completed the tasks between-subject, whereas the online sample (
N
= 347 from Prolific Academic) completed them within-subject, with order counterbalanced. The online sample’s performance across both tasks was reliable (Cronbach’s α
=
.66). For
The Office
, the in-person sample outperformed the online sample on some types of theory of mind, but this was driven by their greater familiarity with the show. Indeed, for the relatively unfamiliar show
Nathan for You
, performance did not differ between the two samples. Together, these results suggest that crowdsourcing platforms elicit reliable performance on novel, dynamic, complex tasks.
To incorporate active-learning sessions into a lecture-based pharmacology course, assess the impact on student learning and attitudes, and address commonly perceived barriers to implementing active ...learning.
Prior to the redesign, the course met twice a week for 75 minutes. As part of the redesign, the two weekly lecture sessions were reduced to 50 minutes each. Additionally, students were assigned to one of three sections that met separately once a week for a 50-minute recitation session in which they applied course concepts to cases, problems, and situations. Data from the two years before the redesign and two years after it were assessed.
Students’ average course grade increased 2.5% after the redesign. Average ratings of the course and instructor on student evaluations each increased significantly (around 0.3 points on a 5-point scale).
Student knowledge and performance in a pharmacology course increased when a portion of the time previously devoted to lecture was replaced with an active-learning session. This experience can serve as a blueprint for how to convert a lecture-only course into a hybrid lecture and recitation model.
•Edge time series capture rapid network-level fluctuations.•Edge time series are synchronized across subjects in movie-watching conditions.•The whole-brain co-fluctuation dynamics are different in ...autism and controls.•Healthy control and autism groups have similar whole-brain peak amplitudes.•Autism has longer whole-brain trough-to-trough duration than controls.
The interaction between brain regions changes over time, which can be characterized using time-varying functional connectivity (tvFC). The common approach to estimate tvFC uses sliding windows and offers limited temporal resolution. An alternative method is to use the recently proposed edge-centric approach, which enables the tracking of moment-to-moment changes in co-fluctuation patterns between pairs of brain regions. Here, we first examined the dynamic features of edge time series and compared them to those in the sliding window tvFC (sw-tvFC). Then, we used edge time series to compare subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and healthy controls (CN). Our results indicate that relative to sw-tvFC, edge time series captured rapid and bursty network-level fluctuations that synchronize across subjects during movie-watching. The results from the second part of the study suggested that the magnitude of peak amplitude in the collective co-fluctuations of brain regions (estimated as root sum square (RSS) of edge time series) is similar in CN and ASD. However, the trough-to-trough duration in RSS signal is greater in ASD, compared to CN. Furthermore, an edge-wise comparison of high-amplitude co-fluctuations showed that the within-network edges exhibited greater magnitude fluctuations in CN. Our findings suggest that high-amplitude co-fluctuations captured by edge time series provide details about the disruption of functional brain dynamics that could potentially be used in developing new biomarkers of mental disorders.
PDF
