61 research outputs found

    Misidentification and Other Preanalytical Errors

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    Misidentification and Other Preanalytical Errors The largest number of laboratory errors occur in the preanalytical phase and are mainly due to educational and organizational reasons. The experience of our institution, as well as the results of an Italian interlaboratory effort to detect and reduce errors/risk of errors in laboratory medicine will be illustrated

    Metacognitive Monitoring of Text Comprehension: An Investigation on Postdictive Judgments in Typically Developing Children and Children With Reading Comprehension Difficulties

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    The ability to assess and monitor one’s own understanding of a written text is fundamental for learning and academic achievement. In the current paper, postdictive monitoring of text comprehension (i.e., the ability to judge the accuracy of responses previously given to a reading comprehension test) was investigated in both typically developing (TD) children and children with reading comprehension difficulties. Children from primary school (3rd to 5th grade) and secondary school (6th to 8th grade) participated in the study (N = 245). They were administered standardized tasks for reading comprehension, in which they had to read two texts and answer 12 multiple-choice questions after each text; subsequently, they had to provide postdictive judgments evaluating their performance: for each answer they had to select whether they judged it as correct, incorrect or whether they were uncertain. Two scores were calculated: Bias score, indicating the difference between metacognitive judgments of accuracy and actual performance; and Accurate estimation, indicating the sum of correct answers judged as “correct” and incorrect answers judged as “incorrect.” Results showed that primary school children were more overconfident than secondary school children and made fewer Accurate estimations especially for “correct” responses. Furthermore, the consideration of a group of children with reading comprehension difficulties showed that these failures are linked to worse metacognitive monitoring ability of comprehension performance in comparison not only to age-matched controls but also to the TD group of third-graders. Implications for learning and achievement are discussed

    Impact of sulphurous water Politzer inhalation on audiometric parameters in children with otitis media with effusion

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    Objectives: The positive effects of spa therapy on ear, nose, and throat pathology are known but robust literature in this field, is still lacking. The aim of this study was to assess through a retrospective analysis, the effects on otitis media with effusion of Politzer endotympanic inhalation of sulphurous waters in children aged 5-9 years. Methods: A cohort of 95 patients was treated with Politzer insufflations of sulphurous water: 58 patients did a cycle consisting of a treatment of 12 days per year for three consecutive years; 37 patients followed the same procedure for 5 years consecutively. The control population was represented by untreated, age-matched children. A standard audiometric test was used before and after each cycle of treatment. Results: One cycle of Politzer inhalation of sulphur-rich water improved the symptoms. Three cycles definitively stabilized the improvement of hearing function. Conclusion: Our results show that otitis media with effusion in children can be resolved by an appropriate non-pharmacological treatment of middle ear with sulphur-rich water

    What Physiotherapists Specialized in Orthopedic Manual Therapy Know About Nocebo-Related Effects and Contextual Factors: Findings From a National Survey

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    none10siopenRossettini, Giacomo; Geri, Tommaso; Palese, Alvisa; Marzaro, Chiara; Mirandola, Mattia; Colloca, Luana; Fiorio, Mirta; Turolla, Andrea; Manoni, Mattia; Testa, MarcoRossettini, Giacomo; Geri, Tommaso; Palese, Alvisa; Marzaro, Chiara; Mirandola, Mattia; Colloca, Luana; Fiorio, Mirta; Turolla, Andrea; Manoni, Mattia; Testa, Marc

    Claimed Effects, Outcome Variables and Methods of Measurement for Health Claims on Foods Related to Vision Proposed Under Regulation (EC) 1924/2006

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    Adequate visual function has a strong impact on the quality of life of people. Several foods and food components have been hypothesized to play a role in the maintenance of normal visual function and in the prevention of eye diseases. Some of these foods/food components have been the object of a request of authorization for use of health claims under Articles 13(5) or 14 of the Regulation (EC) 1924/2006. Most of these requests have received a negative opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) due to the choice of inappropriate outcome variables (OVs) and/or methods of measurement (MMs) applied in the studies used to substantiate the claims. This manuscript refers to the collection, collation and critical analysis of OVs and MMs related to vision. Guidance document and requests for authorization of health claims were used to collect OVs and MMs related to vision. A literature review was performed to critically analyse OVs and MMs, with the aim of defining their appropriateness in the context of a specific claimed effect related to vision. The results highlight the importance of adequate choices of OVs and MMs for an effective substantiation of claims related to visual function

    Claimed Effects, Outcome Variables and Methods of Measurement for Health Claims on Foods Related to Vision Proposed Under Regulation (EC) 1924/2006

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    Adequate visual function has a strong impact on the quality of life of people. Several foods and food components have been hypothesized to play a role in the maintenance of normal visual function and in the prevention of eye diseases. Some of these foods/food components have been the object of a request of authorization for use of health claims under Articles 13(5) or 14 of the Regulation (EC) 1924/2006. Most of these requests have received a negative opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) due to the choice of inappropriate outcome variables (OVs) and/or methods of measurement (MMs) applied in the studies used to substantiate the claims. This manuscript refers to the collection, collation and critical analysis of OVs and MMs related to vision. Guidance document and requests for authorization of health claims were used to collect OVs and MMs related to vision. A literature review was performed to critically analyse OVs and MMs, with the aim of defining their appropriateness in the context of a specific claimed effect related to vision. The results highlight the importance of adequate choices of OVs and MMs for an effective substantiation of claims related to visual function

    Imaginative Representations of Two- and Three-Dimensional Matrices in Children with Nonverbal Learning Disabilities

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    Children with non-verbal learning disabilities (NLD) are characterized by high verbal and poor non-verbal intelligence, poor cognitive abilities, school difficulties, and—sometimes—depressive symptoms. NLD children lack visuospatial working memory, but it is not clear whether they encounter difficulties in mental imagery tasks. In the present study, NLD adolescents without depressive symptoms, depressed adolescents without NLD symptoms, and a control group were administered a mental imagery task requiring them to imagine to move along the cells of a 2-D (5 × 5) or 3-D (3 × 3 × 3) matrix. Results showed that NLD adolescents had difficulty at performing the imagery task when a 3-D pattern was involved. It is suggested that 3-D mental imagery tasks tap visuospatial processes which are weak in NLD individuals. In addition, their poor cognitive performance cannot be attributed to a depressive state, as the depressed group had a performance similar to that of controls

    Subjective remembering and mis-remebering: The rise of memory control in children with typical develpment and with disabilities

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    Remembering one’s own past is an extremely important function as it is related to the human ability of constructing an identity and a sense of Self. Despite the powerful strengths of our memory, research in the past decades has repeatedly revealed its fallacy, both in adults (e.g., Gallo, 2006) and children (e.g., Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008). The case of children is of particular interest, given that initial studies on false memories – remembering episodes that never happened or that did happen but are now recollected in a distorted manner – have supported evidence in favour of children as being more susceptible to memory errors than older children and adults; however, subsequent investigations have revealed a developmental reversal of this trend, with children producing less false memories than adults (Brainerd et al., 2008). The general scope of this dissertation is to address the conditions under which children may evince memory distortions less or more easily than adults, and whether they are able to introspect on their memory states and differentiate true memories from false memories at the subjective level. For this purpose, I employed two techniques in order to investigate subjective remembering: The Remember-Know paradigm (Tulving, 1985) and confidence ratings about one’s own memory traces in different recognition memory paradigms. I was particularly interested in studying these phenomena both in typically developing children (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) and in children with developmental disabilities (Experiment 3, Experiment 4 and Experiment 5). In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, the effects of warning (i.e., telling participants what a false memory is) on false-memory rates and subjective experiences (Remember-Know judgments) were investigated in children (9- and 11-year-olds, Exp.1; 7 to 13 year-olds, Exp. 2) and young adults with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. This paradigm involves the presentation of lists of semantically associated words (e.g., nurse, sick, lawyer, medicine) converging in meaning on a word, the critical lure, which is not presented in the study list but represents the semantic gist of the list (i.e., doctor). After studying these word lists, adults falsely recall or recognize the critical lures with high frequency and claim to experience vivid recollection for the critical lures almost at the same rate as they do for studied words. In Experiment 1, I found that providing a warning prior to list encoding increased false recognition in both groups of children. This effect was modulated by recall: 9-year-olds produced more false recognition when they performed a recall task before the recognition task, whereas the opposite was true for 11-year-olds. The subjective experience of false memories, as assessed with the Remember-Know procedure, was similar across age groups (including young adults). In Experiment 2, two warning conditions (warning with an example of a critical lure, and warning without an example of a critical lure as in Experiment 1) were compared to a control condition. It has been found that the 7-year-olds produced more false memories in both warning conditions compared to the control condition; in contrast, 12-year-olds and adults exhibited reduced false-recognition rates in the warning conditions. The subjective experience associated with false memories was again similar across ages, but differed for true memories, such as age-related increase in subjective recollection was found. Experiment 3 addressed true memories and memory errors when material organized in scripts is presented at encoding, in a special population of children. A paradigm for scripted material (adapted from Lyons, Ghetti, & Cornoldi, 2010) and confidence ratings have been employed. Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and a control group of children matched for age and educational level viewed 18 photographs for each of 4 scripts (waking up in the morning, going grocery shopping, eating at a restaurant and attending a lecture at school). A recognition test followed which included old photographs and new photographs some of which presenting information consistent with the script and some of which depicting the cause (e.g., wiping the table) of an effect (e.g., knocking over a glass of coke) actually viewed during encoding. Children with ADHD, compared to control participants, exhibited lower false recognition for photographs consistent with the script (naming, gap-filling errors), but higher false recognition for causal inferences (naming, backward causal inference errors). Furthermore, children with ADHD were generally more confident in their errors than were control participants. It seems that semantic elaboration, recollective processes, and impulsivity all influence false memories’ formation in children with ADHD at both objective and subjective level. Experiment 4 and Experiment 5 were aimed at investigating recognition memory and recollective experience for a text in adolescents with and without learning difficulties. In Experiment 4, adolescents (age 15 to 19) with learning difficulties were selected upon their performance on a standardized test for text comprehension and on the teachers’ evaluations of their school achievement. In a recognition memory paradigm for text, “poor learners”, compared to a control group, were less efficient at deciding whether target sentences appeared in a previously heard narrative, thus producing fewer hits and more false alarms. Further, “poor learners” were less likely to associate Remember judgments to the target sentences, whereas both groups associated a similar level of Familiar responses to the old items. In Experiment 5 (which tested memory for individual words), poor learners performed similarly to the control group, exhibiting the same degree of recollective experiences following a deep- compared to shallow-encoding condition, and the same pattern of associations between Remember responses and memory for specific details (i.e., item color and spatial position). Together, these results show that students with learning difficulties have a less subjectively compelling memory experience related to a complex text. Overall these experiments showed that younger children (Exp. 1 and 2) and children with developmental disabilities (ADHD, Exp. 3; learning difficulties, Exp. 4) do manifest a different ability at differentiating between true and false memories at the subjective level. Future research should investigate whether this extends to different paradigms and in different populations of children with disabilities, given the important implications this introspective and metacognitive ability has when these children are required to testify in forensic contexts.Scopo generale delle ricerche presentate in questa tesi di dottorato è quello di studiare la percezione soggettiva del ricordo episodico in bambini a sviluppo tipico e adulti (Esperimento 1 e 2) e bambini con disabilità (ADHD, Esperimento 3; difficoltà di apprendimento, Esperimento 4 e 5). Negli Esperimenti 1 e 2, si è voluto approfondire l’effetto del warning (o avvertimento) sulla creazione dei falsi ricordi, attraverso l’utilizzo del paradigma DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) e l’esperienza soggettiva legata sia ai ricordi veritieri che falsi attraverso l’uso del paradigma Remember-Know (Tulving, 1985). Bambini di 9 e 11 anni (Esperimento 1), bambini dai 7 ai 13 anni (Esperimento 2) e giovani adulti hanno partecipato alla ricerca. Il paradigma DRM consiste nella presentazione di liste di parole semanticamente legate tra loro (ad es., infermiere, medicina, ospedale). Le parole di ogni lista sono inoltre legate ad un’esca critica (nell’esempio, dottore) che non viene presentata ai partecipanti. In letteratura si evince che gli adulti in un successivo compito di riconoscimento, ricordano anche la parola critica non presentata, commettendo così un falso ricordo. Avvertire i partecipanti circa la possibilità di commettere tale falso ricordo riduce questo effetto negli adulti. Nell’Esp. 1 si è trovato che i bambini commettono invece più falsi ricordi quando avvertiti. L’esperienza soggettiva (giudizi Remember-Know) non mostra invece effetti diversi in base all’età. Nel secondo esperimento, l’aggiunta di una condizione warning con un esempio specifico di che cosa sia un falso ricordo attraverso l’utilizzo di questo paradigma aumenta ancora di più i falsi ricordi nel gruppo di bambini di 7 anni, mentre li diminuisce nei ragazzini più grandi e nei giovani adulti. Inoltre, i bambini di 7 anni associano un minor numero di esperienze Remember (paradigma Remember-Know) ai ricordi veritieri rispetto agli altri bambini e agli adulti. Nell’Esperimento 3, un gruppo di bambini con ADHD è stato confrontato con un gruppo di controllo su di un paradigma di memoria con materiale organizzato in script (Lyons et al., 2010). Dopo aver codificato una serie di fotografie rappresentanti le azioni tipiche di 4 diversi script (cena al ristorante, routine del mattino, spesa al supermercato e lezione in classe), i bambini erano sottoposti ad un compito di riconoscimento in cui alcune delle foto presentate inizialmente venivano mescolate ad altre nuove. Inoltre, nella fase di codifica venivano presentate delle immagini di effetti le cui cause non venivano invece mostrate (venivano presentate solo al riconoscimento, come distrattori, il riconoscimento delle quali costituisce pertanto un falso ricordo, chiamato Inferential causal error). I bambini con ADHD producevano più errori inferenziali causali e meno errori di riconoscimento di fotografie nuove ma coerenti con gli script. Inoltre erano più sicuri quando commettevano errori di memoria rispetto ai compagni, dimostrando di essere meno in grado di fare un’introspezione sui propri stati interni di memoria. Infine, gli Esperimenti 4 e 5 erano volti ad indagare l’esperienza soggettiva del ricordo legata al riconoscimento di frasi contenute in un testo. Un gruppo di adolescenti con difficoltà di apprendimento (15-19 anni) è stato confrontato con un gruppo di controllo. I ragazzi con difficoltà producevano meno hit (riconoscimenti corretti delle frasi contenute nel testo) e più falsi allarmi. Inoltre, dal punto di vista soggettivo, i ragazzi con difficoltà di apprendimento associavano meno giudizi Remember ai riconoscimenti corretti rispetto al gruppo di controllo (Esperimento 4). L’Esperimento 5 ha testato la memoria di riconoscimento per parole isolate negli stessi gruppi di soggetti. In questo esperimento i ragazzi con difficoltà hanno dimostrato di avere una performance simile a quella del gruppo di controllo sia per quanto riguarda i riconoscimenti corretti sia per quanto riguarda i giudizi Remember-Know. Pertanto, si conclude che i ragazzi con difficoltà hanno una ridotta recollection per materiali complessi di apprendimento come ad esempio un brano. In generale, questi esperimenti mostrano come i bambini più piccoli rispetto a quelli più grandi (Esp. 1 e 2) e i bambini con disabilità rispetto ai bambini a sviluppo tipico (Esp 3 e 4) abbiano una ridotta capacità di valutare soggettivamente i propri ricordi e di differenziare i ricordi veritieri da quelli falsi

    Negative mood reduces false memories for events both at encoding and retrieval

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    Mood affects both memory accuracy and memory distortions. The present study examined how negative, positive, and neutral mood induced either prior to learning or to retrieval affected different types of inferential false memories for everyday events. A recognition memory paradigm for photographs depicting script-like events was administered to undergraduate students (N = 145); this paradigm allows for the investigation of gap-filling and causal errors, representing respectively the likelihood of accepting new information consistent with the encoded scripts and the corresponding unseen cause (e.g., \u201cfamily dinner\u201d script: knocking over a bottle of water on the table) of a viewed action effect (e.g., pieces of a broken bottle on the floor). Further, also the subjective memory experiences accompanying false memories were examined (i.e., Remember-Familiar judgments). Participants were exposed to either negative (n = 49), positive (n = 49) or neutral (n = 47) mood through the presentation of a selection of pictures taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). They were randomly assigned to a Pre-encoding condition, in which they viewed the IAPS pictures before the encoding phase of the memory task, or to a Post-encoding condition, in which they viewed the pictures before retrieval. Results showed that negative mood protected individuals against incorporation of nonpresented information regardless of time of mood induction (i.e., pre- or post-encoding), and this effect varied according to the type of error. Specifically, participants in negative mood produced fewer gap-filling errors than participants in positive mood and fewer causal errors than participants in neutral mood. Further, the negative mood group was also more accurate than the neutral group. The subjective memory experience was also affected by mood, with lower subjective recollection being associated to memory errors in the negative mood group compared to the neutral. Interestingly, both encoding and retrieval were affected, suggesting that attentional and monitoring processes could be responsible for the current findings
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