A major challenge in neuroscience is to understand what happens to a brain as it ages. Such insights could make it possible to distinguish between individuals who will undergo typical aging and those at risk for neurodegenerative disease. Over the last quarter century, thousands of human brain imaging studies have probed the neural basis of age-related cognitive decline. “Aging” studies generally enroll adults over the age of 65, a historical precedent rooted in the average retirement age of U.S. wage-earners. A (...) consequence of this research tradition is that it overlooks one of the most significant neuroendocrine changes in a woman’s life: the transition to menopause. The menopausal transition is marked by an overall decline in ovarian sex steroid production – up to 90% in the case of estradiol – a dramatic endocrine change that impacts multiple biological systems, including the brain. Despite sex differences in the risk for dementia, the influence that biological sex and sex hormones have on the aging brain is historically understudied, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of the aging process. In this Perspective, we highlight the influence that endocrine factors have on the aging brain. We devote particular attention to the neural and cognitive changes that unfold in the middle decade of life, as a function of reproductive aging. Next, we consider emerging evidence from animal and human studies that other endocrine factors occurring earlier in life (e.g. pregnancy, hormonal birth control use) also shape the aging process. Applying a women’s health lens to. (shrink)

Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. The major finding (...) from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences. (shrink)

Across the globe, our work and social lives are increasingly integrated with Information and Communication Technologies, yet massive disparities in the values, uses and benefits of ICT exist. New methods are needed to shed light on unique and integrative concepts of ICT across cultures. This paper explores the use of visual methods to facilitate critical engagement with ICT—defined as situational awareness, reflexive ICT practice and power and control over ICT. This definition of critical ICT engagement is informed by a cultural (...) identity lens, and intends to improve participatory methods in ICT for Development and community technology design and application. Our notion of critical ICT engagement is developed through an analysis of three case studies, each employing visual methods to shed light on concepts and practices of ICT cross-culturally. This paper makes three contributions to the ICT4D literature. First, it establishes a cultural identity lens to chart out cultural differences between researchers and participants, and to develop situational awareness of ICT in context. Second, it defines the conceptual domain of reflexive ICT practice and establishes the key role of researchers in facilitating it. Third, it argues for the need to support participants to develop capacity to engage critically with ICT as a means to influence social and organizational structures. This paper offers a way for researchers and practitioners to engage with cultural issues in community-based research and design using visual methodologies. (shrink)

This paper defines and analyzes the processes of “othering” as they manifest in the practice and praxis of nursing education. Othering is bound up in the establishment and reinforcement of norms, and shores up power inequities that negatively impact faculty, students, and patients. While previous analyses have addressed othering in nursing more broadly, this paper adds a consideration of the multiple processes of othering that operate within the context of nursing education spaces. Cases from recent nursing education literature are interpreted (...) through the frameworks of exclusionary, inclusionary, and structural othering, and provide specific illustrations of the concepts described. The paper concludes by arguing for an application of norm‐critical pedagogical practice to counteract, disrupt and dismantle othering processes within nursing education. (shrink)

The nurse perspective is critical in survey research investigating various aspects of healthcare services, staff, and patient outcomes. Researchers are responsible for ensuring that survey research utilizing survey questionnaires employs research methodological strategies that are aligned with the ethical principles of beneficence, respect for persons, and justice. The purpose of this paper is to discuss best practices to facilitate high-quality survey data collection for nurse survey participants. Recommendations are based on the fundamental ethical principles described in the Belmont Report, an (...) overview of evidence published in the current literature, and the application of practical knowledge. Literature searches conducted in PubMed resulted in the inclusion of over 50 articles from a wide range of disciplines. The results include actionable methods for researchers to consider and follow when conducting survey research utilizing nurse participants. This article serves as a resource to guide researchers through ethically responsible design, implementation, and reporting of nurse survey research. (shrink)

The present study aims to survey Chinese mental health professionals’ attitudes toward therapeutic confidentiality with adolescent patients in specific clinical situations, and compare Chinese adolescents’ and parents’ beliefs about when most mental health professionals would breach confidentiality. A sample of 36 mental health practitioners, 152 parents, and 164 adolescents completed a survey to assess their opinions about when confidentiality should be breached in 18 specific clinical situations. Nearly half of the parents and adolescents and 78% of the therapists in our (...) sample selected “yes” in response to the question of whether the principle of confidentiality applies to adolescents. However, 49% of parents indicated “no,” and 53% of adolescents indicated “not sure.” Compared to adolescents, parents were significantly more likely to believe that therapists would breach confidentiality for the high-breach-likelihood items. For the low-breach-likelihood items, adolescents and parents were significantly more likely than therapists to believe confidentiality should be breached. Results from this study provide data to inform the development, refinement, practical implementation, and communication of guidelines and recommendations specific to adolescents receiving psychotherapy in China. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.

BackgroundReturning neuroimaging incidental findings may create a challenge to research participants’ health literacy skills as they must interpret and make appropriate healthcare decisions based on complex radiology jargon. Disclosing IF can therefore present difficulties for participants, research institutions and the healthcare system. The purpose of this study was to identify the extent of the health literacy challenges encountered when returning neuroimaging IF. We report on findings from a retrospective survey and focus group sessions with major stakeholders involved in disclosing IF.MethodsWe (...) surveyed participants who had received a radiology report from a research study and conducted focus groups with participants, parents of child participants, Institutional Review Board members, investigators and physicians. Qualitative thematic analyses were conducted using standard group-coding procedures and descriptive summaries of health literacy scores and radiology report outcomes are examined.ResultsAlthough participants reported high health literacy skills, 67 % did not seek medical care when recommended to do so; and many participants in the focus groups disclosed they could not understand the findings described in their report. Despite their lack of understanding, participants desire to have information about their radiology results, and the investigators feel ethically inclined to return findings.ConclusionsThe language in clinically useful radiology reports can create a challenge for participants’ health literacy skills and has the potential to negatively impact the healthcare system and investigators conducting imaging research. Radiology reports need accompanying resources that explain findings in lay language, which can help reduce the challenge caused by the need to communicate incidental findings. (shrink)

In this paper, Caitlin Murphy Brust and Rebecca Taylor examine the responsibilities of college educators to resist conditions of epistemic injustice within their institutions. Pedagogy alone cannot bring about epistemic justice in higher education, for no individual epistemic agent can single-handedly transform their epistemic environment. The roots of such injustices are structural and thus require structural interventions. However, college educators do retain some agency to engage in epistemic resistance. Brust and Taylor argue that they can and should take steps (...) to foster just relations within the epistemic communities of their classrooms — calling for pedagogy that both recognizes the unjust features of the broader epistemic environment and responds to the unique forms of epistemic injustice that manifest in the classroom, with particular attention to seminar-style courses. (shrink)

The amygdala is a key brain area regulating responses to stress and emotional stimuli, so improving our understanding of how it is regulated could offer novel strategies for treating disturbances in emotion regulation. As we review here, a growing body of evidence indicates that the gut microbiota may contribute to a range of amygdala-dependent brain functions from pain sensitivity to social behavior, emotion regulation, and therefore, psychiatric health. In addition, it appears that the microbiota is necessary for normal development of (...) the amygdala at both the structural and functional levels. While further investigations are needed to elucidate the exact mechanisms of microbiota-to-amygdala communication, ultimately, this work raises the intriguing possibility that the gut microbiota may become a viable treatment target in disorders associated with amygdala dysregulation, including visceral pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and beyond. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/O5gvxVJjX18 The amygdala plays a central role in regulating many aspects of behavior in rodents and humans, from pain responding to social interaction and psychiatric function. Accumulating evidence suggests microbiota-to-amygdala communication along the gut-brain axis is a key modulator of these amygdala-dependent behaviors, with critical implications for health and disease. (shrink)

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that our (...) data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

Food images are useful stimuli for the study of cognitive processes as well as eating behavior. To enhance rigor and reproducibility in task-based research, it is advantageous to have stimulus sets that are publicly available and well characterized. Food Folio by Columbia Center for Eating Disorders is a publicly available set of 138 images of Western food items. The set was developed for the study of eating disorders, particularly for use in tasks that capture eating behavior characteristic of these illnesses. (...) It contains foods that are typically eaten, as well as those typically avoided, by individuals with eating disorders. Each image has now been rated across 17 different attributes by a large general United States population sample via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Ratings included subjective attributes as well as estimates of nutrient content. Each participant rated a subset of stimulus set food items on all 17 dimensions. Additional description of the image set is provided in terms of physical image information and accurate nutritional information. Correlations between subjective ratings were calculated and an exploratory factor analysis and exploratory cluster analysis completed. Outcomes of the factor analysis suggested foods may be described along three latent factors of healthiness, tastiness, and umami taste; the cluster analysis highlighted five distinct clusters of foods varying on these same dimensions. Descriptive outcomes indicated that the stimulus set includes a range of foods that vary along multiple dimensions and thus is likely to be useful in addressing various research questions surrounding eating behavior and cognition in healthy populations, as well as in those with eating disorders. The provision of comprehensive descriptive information allows for stimulus selection that is optimized for a given research question and promotes strong inference. (shrink)

In its everyday usage, “loyalty” has a lived moral reality. By that I mean that actors consider loyalty to contain some form of moral action, an “ought” or a “should,” whereby they expect the recip...

The law has traditionally been, and will remain, a fundamental tool for addressing health care reform in the United States. With this premise in mind, the “Legal Solutions in Health Reform” project was initiated. The project overview provides a broad understanding of the purpose and layout of the project; the formulation and definition of key legal issues; a brief review of each of the topics covered in the project; a survey of current health statistics in the United States; a discussion (...) of the role of the federal versus state roles in health reform; a review of agencies and committees with jurisdiction over health reform issues; and a survey of means of enforcing health reform efforts. (shrink)

The American public has increasingly identified health care as a key issue of concern. In order to address the multiple problems relating to the access and affordability of health care, President Obama and federal lawmakers across the political spectrum continue to call for major health reform. In any debate on health reform, a predictable set of complex policy, management, economic, and legal issues is likely to be raised. Due to the diverse interests involved, these issues could lead to a series (...) of high-stakes policy debates. Therefore, it is critical that advocates of reform strategies anticipate such issues in order to decrease the likelihood that legally resolvable questions become barriers to substantive health reform. In an effort to frame and study legal challenges and solutions in advance of the heat of political debate, the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have crafted the “Legal Solutions in Health Reform” project. (shrink)

A central feature of our waking mental experience is that our attention naturally toggles back and forth between “external” and “internal” stimuli. In the midst of an externally demanding task, attention can involuntarily shift internally with no clear reason how or why thoughts momentarily shifted inward. In the case of external attention, we are typically exploring and encoding aspects of our external world, whereas internal attention often involves searching for and retrieving potentially relevant information from our memory networks. Cognitive science (...) has traditionally focused on understanding forms of internal and external attention separately, leaving a mystery about what sparks the seemingly automatic shifts between the two. Specifically, what shifts attentional focus from being outward‐directed to being inward‐directed? We present a candidate mechanism: Familiarity‐detection. (shrink)

We provide the results of a systematic key-informant review of medical humanities curricula at fourteen of Canada’s seventeen medical schools. This survey was the first of its kind. We found a wide diversity of views among medical educators as to what constitutes the medical humanities, and a lack of consensus on how best to train medical students in the field. In fact, it is not clear that consensus has been attempted – or is even desirable – given that Canadian medical (...) humanities programs are largely shaped by individual educators’ interests, experience and passions. This anarchic approach to teaching the medical humanities contrasts sharply with teaching in the clinical sciences where national accreditation processes attempt to ensure that doctors graduating from different schools have roughly the same knowledge (or at least have passed the same exams). We argue that medical humanities are marginalized in Canadian curricula because they are considered to be at odds philosophically with the current dominant culture of evidence-based medicine (EBM). In such a culture where adhering to a consensual standard is a measure of worth, the medical humanities – which defy easy metrical appraisal – are vulnerable. We close with a plea for medical education to become more comfortable in the borderlands between EBM and humanities approaches. (shrink)

In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...) meaning about and when some states are more likely than others. In these cases, we find that actors are less likely to arrive at strategies where signals have clear conventional meaning. We conclude with a proposal for extending the use of the methodology of experimental economics in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

We propose that IAM and déjà vu may not share a placement on the same gradient, per se, but the mechanism of cue familiarity detection, and a major differentiating factor between the two metacognitive experiences is whether the resulting inward directed search of memory yields retrieved content or not. Déjà vu may manifest when contentless familiarity detection is inexplicable by the experiencer.

Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

After Discourse is an interdisciplinary response to the recent trend away from linguistic and textual approaches and towards things and their affects. The new millennium brought about serious changes to the intellectual landscape. Favoured approaches associated with the linguistic and the textual lost some of their steam, and were followed by a new curiosity and concern for things and their natures. Gathering contributions from archaeology, heritage studies, history, geography, literature and philosophy, After Discourse offers a range of reflections on what (...) things are, how we become affected by them, and the ethical concerns they give rise to. Through a varied constellation of case studies, it explores ways of dealing with matters which fall outside, become othered from, or simply cannot be grasped through perspectives derived solely from language and writing. After Discourse provides a new perspective for archaeologists, anthropologists and historians interested in the way objects can shed light on areas where textual evidence falls short. (shrink)

The structure of people’s conceptual knowledge of concrete nouns has traditionally been viewed as hierarchical (Collins & Quillian, 1969). For example, superordinate concepts (vegetable) are assumed to reside at a higher level than basic‐level concepts (carrot). A feature‐based attractor network with a single layer of semantic features developed representations of both basic‐level and superordinate concepts. No hierarchical structure was built into the network. In Experiment and Simulation 1, the graded structure of categories (typicality ratings) is accounted for by the flat (...) attractor network. Experiment and Simulation 2 show that, as with basic‐level concepts, such a network predicts feature verification latencies for superordinate concepts (vegetable ). In Experiment and Simulation 3, counterintuitive results regarding the temporal dynamics of similarity in semantic priming are explained by the model. By treating both types of concepts the same in terms of representation, learning, and computations, the model provides new insights into semantic memory. (shrink)

Justifying involuntary psychiatric treatment on the basis of a judgment that a person lacks capacity is usually expressed in terms of a person’s ability to make a decision about his or her health and treatment. Typically, this relates to the ability to refuse treatment. Exactly what “capacity” means, however, and how one determines when another individual lacks capacity, or lacks sufficient capacity, in this context is particularly controversial, with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities insisting (...) that involuntary treatment be abandoned altogether and capacity tests avoided.Capacity is a concept that has multiple meanings and applications across different disciplines and... (shrink)

We describe a new approach for developing and validating cognitive process models. We develop graphical models (specifically, hidden Markov models) both from human empirical data on a task, as well as from synthetic data traces generated by a cognitive process model of human behavior on the task. We show that considering differences between the two graphical models can unveil substantive and nuanced imperfections of cognitive process models that can then be addressed to increase their fidelity to empirical data.

A correlational pilot study (N = 143) and an integrative data analysis of two experiments (total N = 377) provide evidence linking anger to the psychology of social hierarchy. The experiments demonstrate that the experience of anger increases the psychological accessibility of implicit cognitions related to social hierarchy: compared to participants in a control condition, participants in an anger-priming condition completed word stems with significantly more hierarchy-related words. We found little support for sex differences in the effect of anger on (...) implicit hierarchy-related cognition; effects were equivalent across male and female participants. Findings fit with functionalist evolutionary views of anger suggesting that anger may motivate the use of dominance to strive for high social rank in group hierarchies. Implications for downstream behaviour, including aggression and negotiation, are discussed. (shrink)

Despite a recent wave in global recognition of the rights of transgender and gender-diverse populations, referred to in this text by the umbrella label of trans*, international law continues to presume a cisgender binary definition of gender — dismissing the lived realities of trans* individuals throughout the world. This gap in international legal recognition and protection has fundamental implications for health, where trans* persons have been and continue to be subjected to widespread discrimination in health care, longstanding neglect of health (...) needs, and significant violations of bodily autonomy. (shrink)

Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., “I'm looking forward to the weekend”). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space–time metaphors. In this (...) study, we examined the gestures that English‐speaking 6‐to‐7‐year‐olds, 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds, 13‐to‐15‐year‐olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., “tomorrow” versus “yesterday”) and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6‐to‐7‐year‐old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front‐back) axis than in the lateral (left‐right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space–time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures. (shrink)