Dental anxiety prevalence and surgery environment factors: A questionnaire-based survey of attenders in Ireland

Aim: To identify and quantify anxious dental patientsand dental office environment factors that may influence anxiety. Objective: To develop and implement a questionnaire toinvestigate dental anxiety and identify factors thatenhance or lessen dental anxiety in the surgery setting. Methods: Data was collected from patients by a self completed questionnaire when attending dentists at a general dental practice and hospital clinics. Results: The estimated prevalence of dental anxiety in the totalsample was 17.0%. A higher proportion of females were highly anxious. Those attending the Dental Hospital were less likely to be anxious than those who were attending the Dental Practice. An inverse relationship between frequency of dental attendance and dental anxiety was found. Anxiety was significantly higher forthose respondents that indicated that a delay in their appointment would make them more anxious. Of the reported fears regarding their dental visit, 60% of respondents claimed that they were afraid it s going tohurt . When compared to non-anxious patients, more anxious patients feared feeling out of control , a negative experience , the needle, the drill, and being bothered by the smell associated with dental materials.The majority of respondents had a preference for a dentist that was young, friendly, talkative and native English speaking. In general, patients preferred the surgery temperature to be slightly cool. Regardless of anxiety level, 31.0% of patients said that they would prefer the chairside mouth rinse to be plain water with 49.1% not having a preference. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that a significant proportion of patients experience anxiety about visiting the dentist. Many of them have preferences about dentists and the surgery environment which may be modulators of their anxiety. Awareness by the dental profession of the causes of dental anxiety and measures taken by dentists tominimise these trigger factors could have a substantial impact on anxious patients

Spatial Asymmetries In Viewing And Remembering Scenes: Consequences Of An Attentional Bias?

Given a single fixation, memory for scenes containing salient objects near both the left and right view boundaries exhibited a rightward bias in boundary extension (Experiment 1). On each trial, a 500-msec picture and 2.5-sec mask were followed by a boundary adjustment task. Observers extended boundaries 5% more on the right than on the left. Might this reflect an asymmetric distribution of attention? In Experiments 2A and 2B, free viewing of pictures revealed that first saccades were more often leftward (62%) than rightward (38%). In Experiment 3, 500-msec pictures were interspersed with 2.5-sec masks. A subsequent object recognition memory test revealed better memory for left-side objects. Scenes were always mirror reversed for half the observers, thus ruling out idiosyncratic scene compositions as the cause of these asymmetries. Results suggest an unexpected leftward bias of attention that selectively enhanced the representations, causing a smaller boundary extension error and better object memory on the views’ left sides

Marking Rejected Distractors: A Gaze-Contingent Technique For Measuring Memory During Search

There is a debate among search theorists as to whether search exploits a memory for rejected distractors. We addressed this question by monitoring eye movements and explicitly marking objects visited by gaze during search. If search is memoryless, markers might be used to reduce distractor reinspections and improve search efficiency, relative to a no-marking baseline. However, if search already uses distractor memory, there should be no differences between marking and no-marking conditions. In four experiments, with stimuli ranging from Os and Qs to realistic scenes, two consistent data patterns emerged: (1) Marking rejected distractors produced no systematic benefit for search efficiency, as measured by reinspections, reaction times, or errors, and (2) distractor reinspection rates were, overall, extremely low. These results suggest that search uses a memory for rejected distractors, at least in those many real-world search tasks in which gaze is free to move

Coordinating Spatial Referencing Using Shared Gaze

To better understand the problem of referencing a location in space under time pressure, we had two remotely located partners (A, B) attempt to locate and reach consensus on a sniper target, which appeared randomly in the windows of buildings in a pseudorealistic city scene. The partners were able to communicate using speech alone (shared voice), gaze cursors alone (shared gaze), or both. In the shared-gaze conditions, a gaze cursor representing Partner A’s eye position was superimposed over Partner B’s search display and vice versa. Spatial referencing times (for both partners to find and agree on targets) were faster with shared gaze than with speech, with this benefit due primarily to faster consensus (less time needed for one partner to locate the target after it was located by the other partner). These results suggest that sharing gaze can be more efficient than speaking when people collaborate on tasks requiring the rapid communication of spatial information. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental

Transsaccadic Representation of Layout: What Is the Time Course of Boundary Extension?

How rapidly does boundary extension occur? Across experiments, trials included a 3-scene sequence (325 ms/picture), masked interval, and repetition of 1 scene. The repetition was the same view or differed (more close-up or wide angle). Observers rated the repetition as same as, closer than, or more wide angle than the original view on a 5-point scale. Masked intervals were 100, 250, 625, or 1,000 ms in Experiment 1 and 42, 100, or 250 ms in Experiments 2 and 3. Boundary extension occurred in all cases: Identical views were rated as too “close-up,” and distractor views elicited the rating asymmetry typical of boundary extension (wider angle distractors were rated as being more similar to the original than were closer up distractors). Most important, boundary extension was evident when only a 42-ms mask separated the original and test views. Experiments 1 and 3 included conditions eliciting a gaze shift prior to the rating test; this did not eliminate boundary extension. Results show that boundary extension is available soon enough and is robust enough to play an on-line role in view integration, perhaps supporting incorporation of views within a larger spatial framework

False Memory 1/20th Of A Second Later: What The Early Onset Of Boundary Extension Reveals About Perception

Errors of commission are thought to be caused by heavy memory loads, confusing information, lengthy retention intervals, or some combination of these factors. We report false memory beyond the boundaries of a view, boundary extension, after less than 1/20th of a second. Photographs of scenes were interrupted by a 42-ms or 250-ms mask, 250 ms into viewing, before reappearing or being replaced with a different view (Experiment 1). Postinterruption photographs that were unchanged were rated as closer up than the original views; when the photographs were changed, the same pair of closer-up and wider-angle views was rated as more similar when the closer view was first, rather than second. Thus, observers remembered preinterruption views with extended boundaries. Results were replicated when the interruption included a saccade (Experiment 2). The brevity of these interruptions has implications for visual scanning; it also challenges the traditional distinction between perception and memory. We offer an alternative conceptualization that shows how source monitoring can explain false memory after an interruption briefer than an eyeblink

Coordinating Cognition: The Costs and Benefits of Shared Gaze During Collaborative Search

Collaboration has its benefits, but coordination has its costs. We explored the potential for remotely located pairs of people to collaborate during visual search, using shared gaze and speech. Pairs of searchers wearing eyetrackers jointly performed an O-in-Qs search task alone, or in one of three collaboration conditions: shared gaze (with one searcher seeing a gaze-cursor indicating where the other was looking, and vice versa), shared-voice (by speaking to each other), and shared-gaze-plus-voice (by using both gaze-cursors and speech). Although collaborating pairs performed better than solitary searchers, search in the shared gaze condition was best of all: twice as fast and efficient as solitary search. People can successfully communicate and coordinate their searching labor using shared gaze alone. Strikingly, shared gaze search was even faster than shared-gaze-plus-voice search; speaking incurred substantial coordination costs. We conclude that shared gaze affords a highly efficient method of coordinating parallel activity in a time-critical spatial task

Are we nearly there yet? A study of the English National Health Service as professional bureaucracies

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore issues of medical engagement in the management and leadership of health services in the English National Health Service (NHS). The literature suggests that this is an important component of high performing health systems, although the NHS has traditionally struggled to engage doctors and has been characterised as a professional bureaucracy. This study explored the ways in which health care organisations structure and operate medical leadership processes to assess the degree to which professional bureaucracies still exist in the English NHS.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on the qualitative component of a research into medical leadership in nine case study sites, this paper reports on findings from over 150 interviews with doctors, general managers and nurses. In doing so, the authors focus specifically on the operation of medical leadership in nine different NHS hospitals.FindingsConcerted attention has been focussed on medical leadership and this has led to significant changes to organisational structures and the recruitment and training processes of doctors for leadership roles. There is a cadre of doctors that are substantially more engaged in the leadership of their organisations than previous research has found. Yet, this engagement has tended to only involve a small section of the overall medical workforce in practice, raising questions about the nature of medical engagement more broadly.Originality/valueThere are only a limited number of studies that have sought to explore issues of medical leadership on this scale in the English context. This represents the first significant study of this kind in over a decade.</jats:sec

Memory for the Search Path: Evidence for a High-Capacity Representation of Search History

Using a gaze-contingent paradigm, we directly measured observers’ memory capacity for fixated distractor locations during search. After approximately half of the search objects had been fixated, they were masked and a spatial probe appeared at either a previously fixated location or a non-fixated location; observers then rated their confidence that the target had appeared at the probed location. Observers were able to differentiate the 12 most recently fixated distractor locations from non-fixated locations, but analyses revealed that these locations were represented fairly coarsely. We conclude that there exists a high-capacity, but low-resolution, memory for a search path

Do Object Refixations During Scene Viewing Indicate Rehearsal In Visual Working Memory?

Do refixations serve a rehearsal function in visual working memory (VWM)? We analyzed refixations from observers freely viewing multiobject scenes. An eyetracker was used to limit the viewing of a scene to a specified number of objects fixated after the target (intervening objects), followed by a four-alternative forced choice recognition test. Results showed that the probability of target refixation increased with the number of fixated intervening objects, and these refixations produced a 16% accuracy benefit over the first five intervening-object conditions. Additionally, refixations most frequently occurred after fixations on only one to two other objects, regardless of the intervening-object condition. These behaviors could not be explained by random or minimally constrained computational models; a VWM component was required to completely describe these data. We explain these findings in terms of a monitor–refixate rehearsal system: The activations of object representations in VWM are monitored, with refixations occurring when these activations decrease suddenly