Pirate stealth or inattentional blindness?:the effects of target relevance and sustained attention on security monitoring for experienced and naïve operators

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) operators are responsible for maintaining security in various applied settings. However, research has largely ignored human factors that may contribute to CCTV operator error. One important source of error is inattentional blindness--the failure to detect unexpected but clearly visible stimuli when attending to a scene. We compared inattentional blindness rates for experienced (84 infantry personnel) and naïve (87 civilians) operators in a CCTV monitoring task. The task-relevance of the unexpected stimulus and the length of the monitoring period were manipulated between participants. Inattentional blindness rates were measured using typical post-event questionnaires, and participants' real-time descriptions of the monitored event. Based on the post-event measure, 66% of the participants failed to detect salient, ongoing stimuli appearing in the spatial field of their attentional focus. The unexpected task-irrelevant stimulus was significantly more likely to go undetected (79%) than the unexpected task-relevant stimulus (55%). Prior task experience did not inoculate operators against inattentional blindness effects. Participants' real-time descriptions revealed similar patterns, ruling out inattentional amnesia accounts

“Who is really British anyway?” A thematic analysis of responses to online hate materials

This article aims to add to the relatively small body of literature on online hatred. In particular, it focuses on the role social networking sites may play in the development of polarisation, by exploring how online users respond to explicit online hate materials. Specifically, this article discusses the ways in which a self-selected sample of YouTube users responded, via posting online comments, to a video clip in which a White female train passenger (called Emma) could be seen to racially to abuse other passengers. Thematic analysis of the YouTube comments identified four main themes: (1) Making Sense of Emma, which encapsulated posters' attempts to find explanations for Emma’s behaviour; (2) Meeting Hatred with Hatred, which described posters’ attempts to oppose Emma’s racism by means of resorting to aggressive, hateful language; (3) Us versus Them, which encapsulated posters' tendencies to categorise themselves and other posters into in- and outgroups, based on their particular stance on racism; (4) Contesting Britishness, which expressed posters' attempts to articulate (and contest) what it means to be British. Whilst the current analysis provides some evidence that hateful web content can fuel aggressive and hateful responses, many of the comments analysed here emphasised common group membership, alongside people’s right to claim membership in a particular social category (i.e. Britishness). The current evidence, therefore, suggests that, at least in the specific context of this study, hateful web content may not necessarily lead to an automatic endorsement or escalation of hatred

SEGMA: an automatic SEGMentation Approach for human brain MRI using sliding window and random forests

Quantitative volumes from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquired across the life course may be useful for investigating long term effects of risk and resilience factors for brain development and healthy aging, and for understanding early life determinants of adult brain structure. Therefore, there is an increasing need for automated segmentation tools that can be applied to images acquired at different life stages. We developed an automatic segmentation method for human brain MRI, where a sliding window approach and a multi-class random forest classifier were applied to high-dimensional feature vectors for accurate segmentation. The method performed well on brain MRI data acquired from 179 individuals, analyzed in three age groups: newborns (38–42 weeks gestational age), children and adolescents (4–17 years) and adults (35–71 years). As the method can learn from partially labeled datasets, it can be used to segment large-scale datasets efficiently. It could also be applied to different populations and imaging modalities across the life course

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

“Who is really British anyway?”: A thematic analysis of responses to online hate materials

This article aims to add to the relatively small body of literature on online hatred. In particular, it focuses on the role social networking sites may play in the development of polarisation, by exploring how online users respond to explicit online hate materials. Specifically, this article discusses the ways in which a self-selected sample of YouTube users responded, via posting online comments, to a video clip in which a White female train passenger (called Emma) could be seen to racially to abuse other passengers. Thematic analysis of the YouTube comments identified four main themes: (1) Making Sense of Emma, which encapsulated posters' attempts to find explanations for Emma’s behaviour; (2) Meeting Hatred with Hatred, which described posters’ attempts to oppose Emma’s racism by means of resorting to aggressive, hateful language; (3) Us versus Them, which encapsulated posters' tendencies to categorise themselves and other posters into in- and outgroups, based on their particular stance on racism; (4) Contesting Britishness, which expressed posters' attempts to articulate (and contest) what it means to be British. Whilst the current analysis provides some evidence that hateful web content can fuel aggressive and hateful responses, many of the comments analysed here emphasised common group membership, alongside people’s right to claim membership in a particular social category (i.e. Britishness). The current evidence, therefore, suggests that, at least in the specific context of this study, hateful web content may not necessarily lead to an automatic endorsement or escalation of hatred

Percentage (SE) of Experienced and Naïve Operators Failing to Detect the Unexpected Stimulus According to Clip Length and Event Relevance, Based on the Post-Event Questionnaire (Strict Coding Scheme).

<p>^a This value refers to the total number of participants in the cell, not to the number of participants who failed to detect the target.</p

Doing Gender in Group Psychotherapy: Does the Group Elicit Gender-Stereotypical Behavior?

Gender and sex are, even today, two of the most relevant structural categories of societal organization. The present paper first reviews past research on gender and sex in (group) psychotherapy, then deals with an empirical analysis of interactional structures of one psychotherapeutical group (n = 10; 5 female, 5 male patients) from a doing gender perspective. The used interactional analytic method was the SYMLOG inventory as presented by Bales and Cohen (1982). In the examined group, women interacted and were interacted with more frequently than men. The distribution of interactions between the four possible gender dyads shows that the major part of interactions was exchanged between men and women. Only 12,5 % of interactions happened between men. Women uttered significantly more expressive-emotional statements. The other SYMLOG dimensions did not show stereotypical differences. While the group's women expressed an equally positive and negative image of theirselves, the men presented themselves negatively more often. The paper raises the question of (group) psychotherapy as a gendered setting induced by differential socialization. Group psychotherapy might favor women who have been found to have a more interdependent self-concept, while men strive more for independence and individual strength. The paper concludes with a request for gender-reflected psychotherapeutic and group psychotherapeutic work