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At least 613 records · Page 34Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

Cognitive interviewing: verbal data in the design and pretesting of questionnaires.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to discuss problems that occur in questionnaire responses and how cognitive interviewing can be used to identify problematic questions prior to using the questionnaire in the field. BACKGROUND: Questionnaire design involves developing wording that is clear, unambiguous and permits respondents successfully to answer the question that is asked. However, a number of problems in relation to respondents' understanding and successfully completing questionnaires have been identified. Cognitive interviewing, an amalgamation of cognitive psychology and survey methodology, has been developed to identify problematic questions that may elicit response error. The overall aim is to use cognitive theory to understand how respondents perceive and interpret questions and to identify potential problems that may arise in prospective survey questionnaires. METHODS: A literature review is used to examine the process of questionnaire design and how cognitive interviewing can be used to reduce sampling error and increase questionnaire response rates. FINDINGS: Cognitive interviewing involves interviewers asking survey respondents to think out loud as they go through a survey questionnaire and tell them everything they are thinking. This allows understanding of the questionnaire from the respondents' perspective rather than that of the researchers. Cognitive interviews have been used in a number of areas in health care research to pretest and validate questionnaires and to ensure high response rates. Interviewing has been found to be highly effective in developing questionnaires for age specific groups (children and adolescents) and in ascertaining respondents' understanding in health surveys prior to distribution. However, cognitive interviews have been criticized for being overly subjective and artificial. CONCLUSION: Cognitive interviews are a positive addition to current methods of pretesting questionnaires prior to distribution to the sample. They are most valuable in pretesting questions that are complex, where questions are sensitive and intrusive and for specific groups for whom questionnaire completion may pose particular difficulties.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed1997

Recent work on consciousness: philosophical, theoretical, and empirical.

Broad-spectrum philosophical resistance to physicalist accounts of conscious awareness has condensed around a single and clearly identified line of argument. Philosophical analysis and criticism of that line of argument has also begun to crystallize. The nature of that criticism coheres with certain theoretical ideas from cognitive neuroscience that attempt to address both the existence and the contents of consciousness. Also, experimental evidence has recently begun to emerge that will serve both to constrain and to inspire such theorizing. The present article attempts to summarize the situation.

Awareness↗
PubMed1999

Cognitive dedifferentiation in eidetics and synaesthesia: hunting for the ghost once more.

Both synaesthesia and eidetics have a common characteristic of cognitive dedifferentiation. Synaesthesia (e.g. colour-hearing) entails the dedifferentiation of the sensory modalities, while eidetic imagery entails the dedifferentiation of imagery and perception. One can profitably gain by investigating both within the same study. Moreover, some of the same issues have arisen in these, hitherto, separate research literatures. This behoves a common framework for analysis and investigation. We applied a technique previously used for identifying child eidetikers, for screening the adult population, looking at both phenomena in the same sample. After screening, we selected a total of twenty-nine individuals for controlled testing of both phenomena and their variants (structural eidetic imagery, typographic eidetic imagery, colour-hearing synaesthesia, colour-mood synaesthesia). Our participants also completed a number of questionnaires of relevance (absorption, dissociation, and hallucination). We found that the personality trait of absorption underlies the commonality of experience tapped by both typographic and structural eidetic imagery. Furthermore, the latter phenomena were found to have a common pseudohallucinatory experiential base. For subjects scoring relatively high on the absorption scale, there is a negative correlation between structural eidetic imagery and colour-mood synaesthetic differentiation, replicating to a degree results reported earlier.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

The brain may know more than cognitive theory can tell us: a reply to Ted Parks.

In reply to Parks' interpretation of Rock's cognitive theory of illusory figures, we maintain our point of view that such a theory has limited heuristic and explanatory power because it fails to predict subjects' responses in psychophysical tasks. As a result, the theoretical framework defended by Parks is not appropriate for suggesting candidate mechanisms of brain-behaviour function that could underly the phenomenal emergence of such figures.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed1996

Detection of cortical activation during averaged single trials of a cognitive task using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Functional neuroimaging studies in human subjects using positron emission tomography or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are typically conducted by collecting data over extended time periods that contain many similar trials of a task. Here methods for acquiring fMRI data from single trials of a cognitive task are reported. In experiment one, whole brain fMRI was used to reliably detect single-trial responses in a prefrontal region within single subjects. In experiment two, higher temporal sampling of a more limited spatial field was used to measure temporal offsets between regions. Activation maps produced solely from the single-trial data were comparable to those produced from blocked runs. These findings suggest that single-trial paradigms will be able to exploit the high temporal resolution of fMRI. Such paradigms will provide experimental flexibility and time-resolved data for individual brain regions on a trial-by-trial basis.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Imaging neuroscience: principles or maps?

This article reviews some recent trends in imaging neuroscience. A distinction is made between making maps of functional responses in the brain and discerning the rules or principles that underlie their organization. After considering developments in the characterization of brain imaging data, several examples are presented that highlight the context-sensitive nature of neuronal responses that we measure. These contexts can be endogenous and physiological, reflecting the fact that each cortical area, or neuronal population, expresses its dynamics in the context of interactions with other areas. Conversely, these contexts can be experimental or psychological and can have a profound effect on the regional effects elicited. In this review we consider experimental designs and analytic strategies that go beyond cognitive subtraction and speculate on how functional imaging can be used to address both the details and principles underlying functional integration and specialization in the brain.

Animals↗
PubMed1998

Attributions, awareness, and dissociation: in memoriam Kenneth S. Bowers, 1937-1996.

Research by Kenneth S. Bowers on posthypnotic suggestion, positive hallucinations, hypnotic analgesia, and posthypnotic amnesia is reviewed, along with his nonhypnotic research on the person-by-situation interaction and on intuition in problem solving. Bowers's intellectual style, serious curiosity, is offered as a model for hypnosis research.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed2005

Providing cognitive support with technology-based warning systems.

New and emerging technologies promise to revolutionize risk communication. The benefits of technology are discussed with regard to the components of a recently described warning process model. Examples are provided to illustrate how technology can potentially improve information accessibility and cognitive support. Design principles such as warning interactivity, dynamic modification and personalization are considered as potential applications of technology that should enhance warning effectiveness in future technology-based systems.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed1997

The development of gender schemata about heterosexual and homosexual others during adolescence.

Perceptions of heterosexual and homosexual individuals were investigated among 12-, 16-, and 20-year-old French adolescents. Participants described heterosexual and homosexual males and females with typical masculine and feminine personality traits. Overall, they perceived heterosexual males as having more masculine traits than homosexual males. The 16- and 20-year-olds perceived homosexual males as more feminine than heterosexual males, whereas the reverse was observed in 12-year-olds. Furthermore, the 12-year-olds perceived heterosexual females as more feminine than homosexual females, a difference that disappeared in the older age groups. Results support the view of early adolescence as a crucial period in the development of gender schemata about sexually significant others.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Regular versus randomized sentences, nouns versus prepositions, and assimilation in salience.

The authors' research supports an alternative to the theory that organization improves retention by producing fewer elements for processing. College students' recall of randomized words was better for nouns than for prepositions. Regular sentences improved recall, but this improvement was less for nouns than for prepositions. According to the alternative theory, a part assimilates (increases in similarity) to its high-in-salience organization-produced group, thus increases in salience, and hence is retained better. The high-in-salience group for a regular sentence should be the sentence's meaning. Because the nouns were recalled better, they were more similar in salience to the regular sentences' meanings than were the prepositions. Assimilation should be minimal when parts are very similar. Therefore, the nouns' assimilation in salience should have been less than the prepositions', explaining the nouns' less improvement in recall.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

Why do we think? Consequences of regarding thinking as behavior.

Cognitive psychologists have made significant progress in explaining how people think. However, relatively little time and energy have been invested in understanding why we think--the factors that make us start or stop thinking, choose and change strategies and solutions. Such questions are linked to motivation and to discriminative and reinforcing stimuli. In this article, the idea that studying thinking as a form of behavior closely connected to antecedent stimuli and consequences leads to potentially important questions that are not presently being studied in the field of cognitive psychology. This is not an argument for reverting to behaviorism--rather, the argument is made that integrating a behavioral perspective on thinking would enrich cognitive psychology.

Behavior↗
PubMed2000

A preliminary study of the effect of imaginary sexual stimulation on the perceived covariation between freedom and responsibility.

The authors evaluated subjective estimates of the relationship between freedom and responsibility under predictions made in accordance with cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST; V. Denes-Raj & S. Epstein, 1994; S. Epstein, A. Lipson, C. Holstein, & E. Huh, 1992; S. Epstein, R. Pacini, V. Denes-Raj, & H. Meier, 1996; L. A. Kirkpatrick & S. Epstein, 1992). Half of the participants viewed sexually stimulating primes before making judgments. The other participants viewed neutral stimuli before making judgments. Two dependent measures were used: A set of alternate-forms propositions measured perceived relationships between the variables, and response latencies were used to evaluate the hypothesis that persons operating experientially would make judgments faster than persons operating rationally. Results indicated a significant effect for the priming condition with respect to the within-subject dependent variable. In accordance with predictions, further analysis indicated that positive contingency items were endorsed less often by primed participants, and negative contingency items were endorsed more often by primed participants. Results are in line with predictions afforded by the CEST model. Implications are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

The social perceptual deficits of schizophrenia.

This article summarizes a series of studies conducted by our group that examined the social perceptual deficits of schizophrenia. Research suggested that social perceptual deficits are more pronounced in patients with nonparanoid schizophrenia than comparison groups comprising normal controls or individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. The social perceptual deficits of schizophrenia were affected by the level of abstraction of cue descriptors; the level of emotional arousal engendered by the situation; the presence of extraneous, emotionally arousing stimuli; and the familiarity of the situation. These deficits were not found in standardization and cross-validation samples of normal controls, suggesting that these differential deficits represent a characteristic of the disorder rather than a psychometric confound. Social perceptual deficits in schizophrenia were significantly associated with verbal recall memory and relatively unrelated to visual vigilance. These latter findings were used in a study on rehabilitation of cue perception which showed that memory rehabilitation significantly improved cue perception whereas attention focusing strategies had no appreciable effects.

Affect↗
PubMed1997

Cognitive models in a fuller understanding of schizophrenia.

There is a gap in scientific understanding of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, between neurophysiological models of etiology and the behavioral expressions of the disorders. More complete cognitive models are needed to fill that gap. Such models would set neurophysiological models in a more meaningful context, would show how biological processes produce social-behavioral impairments, and would inform both biological and psychosocial treatment strategies. To be fully functional, however, cognitive models must address two key principles: diathesis-stress in the course of schizophrenia, and the nature of reciprocal causality in complex, self-regulating biosystems.

Cognition Disorders↗
PubMed1997

Development of an instrument to assess cognitive processes in physical education classes.

Using the mediating process paradigm (Doyle, 1977) as a framework, the need to develop reliable and valid instruments for assessing cognitive processes is apparent, and that was the purpose of this study. Participants (N = 819) completed the Cognitive Processes Questionnaire in Physical Education (CPQPE), as well as three other instruments addressing dispositional goal orientation, perception of motivational climate, and beliefs about causes of success in physical education. The five-factor structure that emerged in an exploratory factor analysis produced an acceptable fit with the data in the confirmatory factor analysis. The subscales of the CPQPE were related to a task-involved goal perspective and the belief that success is attributed to motivation and effort. The results indicate the CPQPE is a valid and reliable instrument that can provide valuable information about the teaching and learning process.

Achievement↗
PubMed2001

Manipulating generalized motor program difficulty during blocked and random practice does not affect parameter learning.

Blocked practice engenders more trial-to-trial response stability, which is thought to be crucial for developing the generalized motor program (GMP) but not parameter learning (Lai, Shea, Wulf, & Wright, 2000). It was hypothesized that reducing the difficulty of the GMP might permit additional cognitive resources to be allocated to learning the parameter requirements. However, GMP theory maintains the independence of the memories governing the GMP and parameters. This notion suggests that manipulating the difficulty of the GMP should have no effect on the blocked practice participant's ability to successfully specify the appropriate parameters. Participants learned a simple or complex relative timing pattern under either blocked or random practice conditions. Smaller GMP errors were exhibited for the simple relative timing patterns, but this was not associated with improvements in parameter specification following blocked practice. A clear advantage for parameter specification was evident in transfer following random practice. Taken together, these data support the theoretical separation of the GMP and parameter processes.

Analysis of Variance↗