Attitudes to social issues in medicine: a comparison of first-year medical students with first-year students in non-medical faculties

The emphasis on academic achievement in medical student selection has given rise to the fear that students entering medicine may comprise a homogeneous group with tendencies towards academic and scientific pursuits rather than humanistic and person-oriented health care. The Attitudes to Social Issues in Medicine (ATSIM) scale was administered to first-year Australian medical students and first-year students in other faculties including students with significantly lower academic performance measured by high school examination scores. The medical student group was found to be less conservative towards general social issues than students enrolled in commerce and science faculties and scored equally with arts students. Greater conservatism was, however, apparent in those areas which most closely affect the doctor's role. Medical students were less positive than other student groups in their attitudes towards increased government control of the medical profession, the contribution of allied health professionals and the importance of social aspects of illness. On attitudes to issues such as prevention and doctor-patient relationships which do not challenge the knowledge base or traditional role and status of the medical profession, however, medical students demonstrate equal or greater concern compared with other student groups.     

Studying Weak Central Coherence at Low Levels: Children with Autism do not Succumb to Visual Illusions. A Research Note

While anecdotal reports of abnormal perceptual experiences in autism abound, there have been to date no experimental studies showing fundamental perceptual peculiarities. The present paper reports results from a first study of low-level visual integration in autism. Twenty-five subjects with autism, 21 normal 7- and 8-year-olds, and 26 children with learning difficulties were asked to make simple judgements about six well-known visual illusions. Two conditions were used, in an attempt to explore group differences; standard two-dimensional black and white line drawings, and the same figures augmented with raised coloured lines. The subjects with autism were less likely to succumb to the two-dimensional illusions than were the other groups, and were less aided by the three-dimensional disembedded' condition. These striking results are discussed with reference to the 'central coherence' account of autism.     

积极、消极情感在社区老年高血压患者疾病感知与健康促进行为之间的双重中介作用

目的 探讨社区老年高血压患者疾病感知和健康促进行为的关系及积极、消极情感在两者之间的中介作用。方法 采用疾病感知问卷简化版(BIPQ)、老年人健康促进行为量表(GHP),积极、消极情感量表(PANAS)对2021年12月至2022年2月广州市3家社区卫生服务中心和1家三甲医院的高血压门诊就诊的240例老年高血压患者进行横断面调查。构建结构方程模型,并采用Bootstrap抽样法对模型进行验证。结果 社区老年高血压患者疾病感知总分为(24.74±4.45)分,健康促进行为总分为(71.78±8.70)分,积极情感总分为(20.15±3.55)分,消极情感总分为(12.16±3.11)分。相关分析显示,疾病感知、消极情感与健康促进行为呈负相关(P<0.01);积极情感与健康促进行为呈正相关(P<0.01);疾病感知与消极情感呈正相关(P<0.01),而与积极情感呈负相关(P<0.01)。双重中介结构方程模型显示：拟合优度检验(χ²/df)=1.641、近似残差均方根(RMSEA)=0.054、比较拟合指数(CFI)=0.961。积极、消极情感在...     

Trajectory of contact region on the fingerpad gives the illusion of haptic shape

When one explores a solid object with a fingertip, a contact region is usually defined. When the trajectory of this region on the fingerpad is artificially controlled so as to resemble the trajectory that is normally present while exploring a real object, the experience of shape is created. In order to generate appropriate local deformation trajectories, we built a servo-controlled mechanism that rolled a flat plate on the fingerpad during the manual exploration of virtual surfaces so that the plate was kept tangent to a virtual shape at the point of virtual contact. An experiment was then designed to test which mode of exploration maximized the shape information gain: active versus semi-active exploration, where semi-active exploration is when one hand touches passively and the other moves the target object, and the use of single versus multiple points of contact. We found that subjects were able to perform curvature discrimination at levels comparable to those achieved when using direct manual contact with real objects, and that the highly simplified stimulus provided by the device was a sufficient cue to give the illusion of touching three-dimensional surfaces.     

Heart Rate Perception and Heart Rate Control

Twenty-one subjects look the Autonomic Perception Questionnaire (APQ) and later were given another test of ability to perceive heart activity. The second test involved subjects' tracking of their own heart rates (HR). They were then tested for ability to increase and decrease HR from their resting baseline levels. No significant relationships were found between HR control and APQ score. HR decrease success seemed to depend mainly on respiration differences between rest and decrease periods. The subjects who achieved high scores on the heart tracking test increased HR significantly better than did low scorers. This heart perception vs HR increase relationship did not depend upon respiration rate, respiration amplitude, or baseline HR differences between high and low scorers on the tracking test. A low correlation between APQ and tracking score seemed to indicate that the two perception tests measured different attributes of the subjects.     

Representation of heading direction in far and near head space

Manipulation of objects around the head requires an accurate and stable internal representation of their locations in space, also during movements such as that of the eye or head. For far space, the representation of visual stimuli for goal-directed arm movements relies on retinal updating, if eye movements are involved. Recent neurophysiological studies led us to infer that a transformation of visual space from retinocentric to a head-centric representation may be involved for visual objects in close proximity to the head. The first aim of this study was to investigate if there is indeed such a representation for remembered visual targets of goal-directed arm movements. Participants had to point toward an initially foveated central target after an intervening saccade. Participants made errors that reflect a bias in the visuomotor transformation that depends on eye displacement rather than any head-centred variable. The second issue addressed was if pointing toward the centre of a wide-field expanding motion pattern involves a retinal updating mechanism or a transformation to a head-centric map and if that process is distance dependent. The same pattern of pointing errors in relation to gaze displacement was found independent of depth. We conclude that for goal-directed arm movements, representation of the remembered visual targets is updated in a retinal frame, a mechanism that is actively used regardless of target distance, stimulus characteristics or the requirements of the task.     

Reduced visuospatial performance in children with the D2 dopamine receptor A1 allele

Previous studies suggest a reduced dopaminergic function in subjects with the A1 (minor) allele of the D2 dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene. To explore influences on visuospatial ability as a function of the DRD2 gene, 182 alcohol- and other drug-naive sons (age 10–14) of active alcoholic, recovered alcoholic, and nonalcoholic fathers were administered a visuospatial task (Benton's Judgment of Line Orientation Test) which makes minimal motoric/verbal demands. Visuospatial scores were lower for boys with the A1 allele and for sons of active alcoholics. A1-allele boys made more errors than A2 boys on all 11 of the template lines, with the effect being largest for the rightmost presentations. In contrast, the effect of family history for alcoholism was strongest on both right and left midquadrant presentations. Moreover, separate analyses of the two types of errors produced allele but not family history of alcoholism effects when the two lines were misjudged as farther apart than they actually were and family history but not allele effects where the two lines were misjudged as closer together. These results suggest that polymorphism of the DRD2 gene and family history of alcoholism are dissociable determinants of visuospatial ability and that visuospatial defects previously observed in alcoholics may, in part, be antecedent to their drinking behavior.     

The role of stimulus type in age-related changes of visual working memory

Aging is accompanied by increasing difficulty in working memory associated with the temporary storage and processing of goal-relevant information. Face recognition plays a preponderant role in human behavior, and one might therefore suggest that working memory for faces is spared from age-related decline compared to socially less important visual stimulus material. To test this hypothesis, we performed working memory (n-back) tasks with two different visual stimulus types, namely faces and doors, and compared them to tasks with primarily verbal material, namely letters. Age-related reaction time slowing was comparable for all three stimulus types, supporting hypotheses on general cognitive and motor slowing. In contrast, performance substantially declined with age for faces and doors, but little for letters. Working memory for faces resulted in significantly better performance than that for doors and was more sensitive to on-line manipulation errors such as the temporal order. All together, our results show that even though face perception might play a specific role in visual processing, visual working memory for faces undergoes the same age-related decline as it does for socially less relevant visual material. Moreover, these results suggest that working memory decline cannot be solely explained by increasing vulnerability in prefrontal cortex related to executive functioning, but indicate an age-related decrease in a visual short-term buffer, possibly located in the temporal cortex.     

Brainstem control of sensory information: a mechanism for perception

We have proposed a theory in which pathways ascending from the brainstem reticular formation control sensory centers in the dorsal thalamus and neocortex. We assumed that the sensory messages received at a given level are transformed by a stochastic process, called Alopex, in a way which maximizes responses in central feature analyzers. Perception is seen as a process involving a close cyclic interaction between brainstem and sensory relays. We discuss the specific case of visual information flow and the proposed modification of visual images at the level of the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN). Computer simulations of a simple model, representing the dLGN and reafferent control emanating from the reticular formation, show that sensory features are effectively enhanced and--in the absence of sensory input--quasi-sensory features may be generated by feedback of a simple scalar variable that is formed by the non-linear superposition of the responses of any number of feature analyzers. The model proposes a specific mechanism for such processes as visual imagery, hallucinations, and dreaming, and provides a framework for further studies into the nature of cognitive brain functions.     

How is electrical stimulation of the brain experienced,and how can we tell? Selected considerations on sensorimotor function and speech

ABSTRACT

Electrical stimulation of the nervous system is a powerful tool for localizing and examining the function of numerous brain regions. Delivered to certain regions of the cerebral cortex, electrical stimulation can evoke a variety of first-order effects, including observable movements or an urge to move, or somatosensory, visual, or auditory percepts. In still other regions the subject may be oblivious to the stimulation. Often overlooked, however, is whether the subject is aware of the stimulation, and if so, how the stimulation is experienced by the subject. In this review of how electrical stimulation has been used to study selected aspects of sensorimotor and language function, we raise questions that future studies might address concerning the subjects’ second-order experiences of intention and agency regarding evoked movements, of the naturalness of evoked sensory percepts, and of other qualia that might be evoked in the absence of an overt first-order experience.