Explaining enhanced logical consistency during decision making in autism

The emotional responses elicited by the way options are framed often results in lack of logical consistency in human decision making. In this study, we investigated subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using a financial task in which the monetary prospects were presented as either loss or gain. We report both behavioral evidence that ASD subjects show a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect and psycho-physiological evidence that they fail to incorporate emotional context into the decision-making process. On this basis, we suggest that this insensitivity to contextual frame, although enhancing choice consistency in ASD, may also underpin core deficits in this disorder. These data highlight both benefits and costs arising from multiple decision processes in human cognition

Promoting Character At Institutions Of Higher Education And In Their Academic Units

Employers are highly interested in the character traits of college graduates. They recognize that these attributes will be an important determinant in the degree of success their organizations will experience. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of students enrolled in public institutions of higher education are not prepared academically, behaviorally, or emotionally for the college experience. In addition, lack of academic integrity on campus poses its own set of problems.  Employers also realize that special ethical obligations exist for employees with financial reporting responsibilities. Accountants are required to generate accurate and timely information to stakeholders both inside and outside of the organization. Employers are keenly interested in hiring accountants who are willing to assume the responsibility for promoting integrity throughout the firm.  To compete in today’s educational market place, many institutions of higher learning focus upon beautifully manicured grounds, impressively designed and technologically advanced buildings, and learned faculty. Alternatively, do these institutions dedicate adequate resources and expend the necessary levels of energies to promote character and other desirable traits in students? Isn’t character just as important in public higher education as critical analysis or technical skills?  This article proposes the development and use of creeds by departments, colleges, and/or universities to underscore the importance of character, scholarship, and performance to students. A creed is a statement of institutional expectations, beliefs, principles, and values. It is a public pronouncement of what a department, college or university holds to be important. It is meant to inspire and encourage commitment to stated ideals and help develop appropriate attitudes across campus. Two versions of a proposed creed, a long and short version, are presented

Looking for bright spots: a bottom-up approach to encouraging urban exercise

Many journeys in urban environments are short and could be conveniently carried out on foot or bike. However, many people use public transport or cars and this places pressure on urban transport infrastructures. Motivating people to change their transport habits is a wicked problem and challenging to address. We outline our current approach that involves a long term study of FitbBit users to identify the bright spots: the factors that enable people to successfully change their habits in the long term

Enterprise Accountants, Managerial Status And Gender Salaries

This paper reports on the relationship between salary and a set of explanatory variables for a sample of enterprise (management) accountants. In order to conduct the analysis, a sample was drawn from a large southeastern chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Based upon human capital theory and gender research, different groups of variables are regressed against salary for the 1) sample as a whole; 2) for those enterprise accountants with management status; and 3) for those enterprise accountants without managerial status. Each of the three hypotheses is partially supported. In addition, gender discrimination appears to be limited to non-managers

Minocycline differentially modulates human spatial memory systems

Microglia play a critical role in many processes fundamental to learning and memory in health and are implicated in Alzheimer’s pathogenesis. Minocycline, a centrally-penetrant tetracycline antibiotic, inhibits microglial activation and enhances long-term potentiation, synaptic plasticity, neurogenesis and hippocampal-dependent spatial memory in rodents, leading to clinical trials in human neurodegenerative diseases. However, the effects of minocycline on human memory have not previously been investigated. Utilising a double-blind, randomised crossover study design, we recruited 20 healthy male participants (mean 24.6 ± 5.0 years) who were each tested in two experimental sessions: once after 3 days of Minocycline 150 mg (twice daily), and once 3 days of placebo (identical administration). During each session, all completed an fMRI task designed to tap boundary- and landmark-based navigation (thought to rely on hippocampal and striatal learning mechanisms respectively). Given the rodent literature, we hypothesised that minocycline would selectively modulate hippocampal learning. In line with this, minocycline biased use of boundary- compared to landmark-based information (t980 = 3.140, p = 0.002). However, though this marginally improved performance for boundary-based objects (t980 = 1.972, p = 0.049), it was outweighed by impaired landmark-based navigation (t980 = 6.374, p < 0.001) resulting in an overall performance decrease (t980 = 3.295, p = 0.001). Furthermore, against expectations, minocycline significantly reduced activity during memory encoding in the right caudate (t977 = 2.992, p = 0.003) and five other cortical regions, with no significant effect in the hippocampus. In summary, minocycline impaired human spatial memory performance, likely through disruption of striatal processing resulting in greater biasing towards reliance on boundary-based navigation

Information Technology: A Study Of Ac-countants Skills And Knowledge Levels

This article examines the results of a survey mailed to 940 accounting professionals in which they identify the categories of IT skills and knowledge that are required to perform their job. Using cluster analysis, this article next examines whether - and to what extent -relationships exist between different categories of IT skills and knowledge. Survey results are then presented regarding methods by which accounting professionals acquire needed job-related IT skills and knowledge

The Challenge of Maintaining Interest in a Large-Scale Public Floor Display

Floor displays, because of the novelty of their location, can be more effective at grabbing the attention of passersby than public wall mounted screens. However, a concern is that as floor displays become more familiar, people will take less notice of them. We are exploring how to maintain interest in a large-scale interactive floor display in a semi-public university location. Our ongoing research involves exploring ways to enable participants to update the content of the display and seeing how effectively this keeps them interested. Firstly, we are making the floor display interactive so that participants can manipulate the content in real-time using whole body interaction. Secondly, we are encouraging the local community to generate content for the display

Tracking physical activity: Problems related to running longitudinal studies with commercial devices

The problems with inactive and sedentary lifestyles are widely recognised. People believe that activity tracking systems, such as the Fitbit, may aid them in meeting recommended levels of physical activity. Similar systems have been the subject of previous research, but many of these studies were conducted over a short-term and some results may be attributable to reactivity or novelty effects. We ran a longitudinal mixed-methods effectiveness study using the Fitbit Zip activity tracker with 50 participants. In this paper we present two main challenges experienced during this study: the unreliability of the device and a lack of engagement by some of the participants. The issues we experienced can help inform the design of future studies

Social networking use and RescueTime: The issue of engagement

The dramatic rise in the use of social network sites (SNS) has resulted in a number of users feeling stressed about the extent of their personal use. Previous work has established that daily retrospective estimations of SNS use and access to RescueTime not only improve accuracy of estimations but also reduce perceived stress. The present study aimed to extend this by also exploring the influence of prospective estimations on stress and perceived time management. However, the study was thwarted by incredibly low engagement with RescueTime and consequently, no improvement in estimation accuracy and no reduction in stress. This indicates substantial individual differences in engagement and a requirement for external sources of motivation for using personal informatics, beyond the tasks of the study