Naturalistic Tasks Can Benefit Psychiatry

Maselli et al. do an excellent job highlighting how studying rich, complex, naturalistic behaviors can help neuroscientists and psychologists understand neural and mental phenomena. We fully concur with their arguments, as well as with somewhat similar ones made by other scholars. Indeed, we believe that the potential value of naturalistic paradigms is even greater than the authors state. We are particularly sanguine about the power of the naturalistic approach to help with understanding psychiatric diseases

Redefining the pattern of age-prospective memory-paradox: new insights on age effects in lab-based, naturalistic, and self-assigned tasks

© The Author(s) 2018Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering intended actions in the future, such as posting a letter when seeing a post box (event-based PM) or making a phone call at 2:00 pm (time-based PM). Studies on aging and PM have often reported negative age e ects in the laboratory, but positive age e ects in naturalistic tasks outside the laboratory (the so-called age–PM-paradox). The present study re-examined this pattern of the paradox by studying, for the rst time, age di erences in time- and event-based PM in lab-based, experimenter-generated naturalistic and self-assigned real-life PM tasks within the same sample of young and older adults. Results showed that di erential age e ects in and outside the laboratory were quali ed by the type of PM cue. While age-related de cits were obtained for laboratory event-based tasks, no age e ect was obtained for naturalistic event-based PM. Age bene ts in the eld were only observed for naturalistic time-based tasks, but not for participants’ own self-assigned time-based tasks. These ndings indicate that the age bene ts for naturalistic PM tasks may have been overestimated due to the dominant use of experimenter-generated naturalistic time-based PM tasks in previous studies. Therefore, the precise pattern of the age–PM-paradox may need rede ning as mostly consisting of negative age e ects in lab-based PM tasks and mostly the absence of negative age e ects (rather than age bene ts) in naturalistic and self-assigned tasks outside the laboratory.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Age differences in prospective memory: Laboratory versus naturalistic settings

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember and perform intended actions at the appropriate point in the future. PM is a cognitive ability that is vital to many aspects of daily functioning, and it is particularly important for older adults who wish to maintain functional independence. The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate factors that potentially contribute to the age-PM paradox. The age-PM paradox refers to the contrasting age effects on PM performance with age-related deficits observed on laboratory tasks, but no age differences or even age-related benefits observed on naturalistic tasks. Several proposed factors that possibly contribute to the age-PM paradox were examined in two tangential studies. Firstly, a descriptive study of self-directed PM tasks in daily life was conducted. The study examined how the context of PM task completion in the real world might vary between young and older adults, as such differences may contribute to age differences in naturalistic PM performance. To improve upon previous naturalistic studies, the study employed an experience-sampling method to capture PM successes and failures throughout the day. Contrary to popular belief, the findings suggest that dissimilarities in the demands of everyday life and the usage of external reminders, such as diaries, cannot explain the improved naturalistic PM performance of older adults. However, older adults were found to regard their PM tasks as important more often than young adults. Older adults also rehearsed their PM intentions more frequently than young adults. Thus, it is possible that the age benefit observed in naturalistic settings is related to older adults’ motivation and their ability to plan and rehearse their PM tasks within their own environment. Relatively few instances of PM failures were reported by both age groups. Further evidence suggests that participants retrieved their PM intentions through both spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring processes, which provides support for the multiprocess framework of PM. The second study rigorously examined whether the comparison of inherently dissimilar tasks could be contributing to the age-PM paradox. Laboratory PM tasks are predominantly event-based tasks, while naturalistic PM tasks are typically time-based, occurring at a set time of day. To address the lack of task comparability across settings, novel naturalistic PM measures were developed to objectively assess PM performance on three types of tasks: event-based, scheduled time-based (typical of prior naturalistic studies), and time-check tasks (typical of prior laboratory studies). The study is the first investigation of age differences in laboratory and naturalistic settings on all three types of PM tasks using the same participant sample in both settings. Laboratory PM performance was assessed using a computerised version of Virtual Week, which simulates activities of daily life in a board game format. Naturalistic PM performance was assessed using smartphones and an application developed specifically for this thesis. In the laboratory, age-related deficits were observed on all three task types. However, in the naturalistic setting, older adults performed better than young adults on scheduled time-based tasks, performed just as well as the young adults on event-based tasks, and performed equally poorly on time-check tasks. The findings suggest that older adults demonstrate improved PM performance in everyday life when the PM tasks possess an event-like quality, which allows for further environmental support for successful task completion. Regardless of the setting, older adults consistently exhibited poor performance on time-check tasks. This finding suggests that older adults’ PM performance suffers when the PM tasks are particularly demanding and rely heavily on effortful monitoring processes for intention retrieval. Overall, the current research suggests that the age-PM paradox cannot be completely explained by contextual differences surrounding naturalistic PM performance or by the lack of task comparability across settings in the existing literature. However, given the substantial improvement in older adults’ naturalistic performance on scheduled time-based tasks, but not on time-check tasks, this thesis highlights the importance of this relatively rare time-based task distinction when considering the age-PM paradox. Taken together, the studies indicate that older adults’ naturalistic PM performance benefits from explicit cues, environmental support, and the ability to plan and rehearse PM intentions

Naturalistic Driving Performance During Secondary Tasks

Data from 36 drivers involved in a naturalistic driving study was analyzed to determine the frequency and conditions under which drivers engage in secondary behaviors and to explore the relationship these behaviors might have with driving performance. Researchers coded 1,440 five-second video clips of the drivers’ faces for the occurrence of specific secondary behaviors and the duration of glances away from the forward scene. Corresponding performance data from the instrumented vehicles were used to calculate variability of steering angle, mean and variability of lane position, mean and variability of throttle position, and variability of speed. All categories of secondary behavior were associated with significantly higher variability in steering angle. The results for other performance measures were mixed. In summary; driving performance measures vary with differing tasks, with no single driving performance indicator that is obviously predictive of drivers’ engagement in secondary tasks

Extracting Hierarchies of Search Tasks & Subtasks via a Bayesian Nonparametric Approach

A significant amount of search queries originate from some real world information need or tasks. In order to improve the search experience of the end users, it is important to have accurate representations of tasks. As a result, significant amount of research has been devoted to extracting proper representations of tasks in order to enable search systems to help users complete their tasks, as well as providing the end user with better query suggestions, for better recommendations, for satisfaction prediction, and for improved personalization in terms of tasks. Most existing task extraction methodologies focus on representing tasks as flat structures. However, tasks often tend to have multiple subtasks associated with them and a more naturalistic representation of tasks would be in terms of a hierarchy, where each task can be composed of multiple (sub)tasks. To this end, we propose an efficient Bayesian nonparametric model for extracting hierarchies of such tasks \& subtasks. We evaluate our method based on real world query log data both through quantitative and crowdsourced experiments and highlight the importance of considering task/subtask hierarchies.Comment: 10 pages. Accepted at SIGIR 2017 as a full pape

Children's Planning Performance in the Zoo Map Task (BADS-C) : Is It Driven by General Cognitive Ability, Executive Functioning, or Prospection?

Preparation of this article was partially funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF; 100014_152841) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC; RGPIN-2015-03774).Peer reviewedPostprin

Controlled Experimentation in Naturalistic Mobile Settings

Performing controlled user experiments on small devices in naturalistic mobile settings has always proved to be a difficult undertaking for many Human Factors researchers. Difficulties exist, not least, because mimicking natural small device usage suffers from a lack of unobtrusive data to guide experimental design, and then validate that the experiment is proceeding naturally.Here we use observational data to derive a set of protocols and a simple checklist of validations which can be built into the design of any controlled experiment focused on the user interface of a small device. These, have been used within a series of experimental designs to measure the utility and application of experimental software. The key-point is the validation checks -- based on the observed behaviour of 400 mobile users -- to ratify that a controlled experiment is being perceived as natural by the user. While the design of the experimental route which the user follows is a major factor in the experimental setup, without check validations based on unobtrusive observed data there can be no certainty that an experiment designed to be natural is actually progressing as the design implies.Comment: 12 pages, 3 table