Meta-effectiveness, Effectance, Mindware and Other Key Concepts for Understanding the Development of Adult Competence

This article presents a list of concepts that are importants for understanding adult development of competence  (including "learning to learn") but that have not received sufficient attention in the literature on self-regulated learning

A design-based approach to sleep-onset and insomnia: super-somnolent mentation, the cognitive shuffle and serial diverse imagining

This paper describes an approach to sleep onset (SO) and insomnia that involves a broad, design-based theory of cognition and affect (H-CogAff, Sloman, 2003). It proposes that the SO Control System (SOCS) has somnolent and insomnolent mentation inputs. A disruption of situational awareness and temporal sense making is posited to be somnolent. Perturbance (tertiary emotion) and primary emotions are posited as insomnolent. Many prior deliberate mentation strategies, prescribed as cognitive therapy for insomnia (CT-I), appear to be insufficiently counter-insomnolent (e.g., insufficiently able to compete with insistent motivators) and not inherently somnolent. According to tenets presented here, serial diverse imagining, a deliberate form of mentation involving a cognitive shuffle, is predicted to be super-somnolent (somnolent and counter-insomnolent).  This paper calls for the development of SOCS theories and CT-I, both from the design stance. Particular attention should be given to perturbance and the possibility of super-somnolent mentation

The possibility of super-somnolent mentation: A new information-processing approach to sleep-onset acceleration and insomnia exemplified by serial diverse imagining

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework and techniques for sleep-onset acceleration: the somnolent mentation framework. It distinguishes between somnolent, asomnolent and insomnolent mentation. Somnolent mentation inherently accelerates sleep onset (SO). Insomnolent mentation (e.g., deliberating, ruminating or focusing on one’s arousal) interferes with SO. Deliberate mentation approaches to insomnia attempt to influence the participant’s mentation at SO. They may prescribe somnolent or counter-insomnolent mentation. Existing deliberate mentation approaches attempt mainly to counter insomnolent mentation (e.g., thought control through imagery distraction). Thus they are at best counter-insomnolent. Super-somnolent mentation is both somnolent and counter-insomnolent. Extended SO (E-SO) is defined as the period just before SO (P-SO) combined with SO. A scientific challenge is to correctly classify features of mentation as somnolent, asomnolent and insomnolent. This classification should be done both from a phenomena-based perspective—e.g., the empirical study of E-SO mentation— and from a designer-based perspective (in terms of a theory of the architecture of the human mind). This paper proposes a secondary hypothesis: the E-SO mentation emulation hypothesis. To emulate somnolent features of P-SO mentation is somnolent. This paper proposes also that some types of incoherent mentation are super-somnolent.  This paper presents no new empirical data. However, from the new conjectures, several predictions can be derived, new treatments developed, and new possibilities investigated. From the incoherent mentation principle the serial diverse imagining (SDI) family of techniques is derived. From this and related considerations SDI is expected to be super-somnolent

Mending Broken Hearts: Specification for a productive practice app to assess and improve psychological treatments for romantic grief and other tertiary emotions

The poster below summarizes the theory, purpose and requirements (intended functionality) of an iOS® app ("RFB") being designed to help users (1) regulate a specific emotion (romantic grief), (2) instill some of the mindware[1] of acceptance and commitment (Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson, 2011), and (3) better understand and regulate their affective states after their romantic grief is resolved. The design applies principles of meta-effectiveness theory (Beaudoin, 2015a). We intend RFB also to help researchers develop and experimentally contrast emotion regulation treatments for romantic grief and other forms of perturbance (Beaudoin, 1994) by using productive practice and other components of meta-effectiveness. Other objectives are listed in the poster below

Serial diverse imagining task: A new remedy for bedtime complaints of worrying and other sleep-disruptive mental activity

Introduction: A racing mind, worries, and uncontrollable thoughts are common bedtime complaints among poor sleepers. Beaudoin created a Serial Diverse Imagining task (SDIT) that can be used at bedtime to divert attention away from sleep interfering thoughts, An app randomly presents recordings of relatively concrete words one at a time with an 8-second interval between recordings during which the person creates and maintains a mental image of the word until the next recording prompts the next image and so on. Our study is an experimental test of SDIT compared to the standard treatment of Structured Problem-solving (SP) and to the combination of both treatments. A key feature of SP is that it must be done earlier than bedtime and requires about 15 minutes to do it.  SDIT, which is done at bedtime, does not have those constraints.  Method: 154 university students (137 female) who complained of excessive cognitive pre-sleep arousal were randomly assigned to receive SDIT, SP, or both.  At baseline, they completed Pre-Sleep Arousal Scale (Somatic and Cognitive), Sleep Quality Scale, Glasgow Sleep Effort Scale and Sleep Hygiene Index.  Depending on the measure, participants redid it one week and/or one month after starting the intervention.  (They also completed sleep diaries and appraisals of the interventions, which are omitted due to space). Results: Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that cognitive and somatic pre-sleep arousal , sleep effort, and sleep quality improved significantly relative to baseline (p  < .001; Partial η2 = .43 to .71) even though sleep hygiene worsened ( p  < .001; Partial η2 =  .23). The latter finding is not unexpected because the baseline was done at the start of the academic term before the onset of academic pressures. The fact that we found sleep and arousal improvements in this context are notable. Conclusion: Beaudoin’s Serial Diverse  Imagining Task (SDIT) was as effective as Structured Problem-Solving (SP) in reducing pre-sleep arousal, sleep effort, and poor sleep quality.  One advantage of SDIT is that it can be done at bedtime, unlike SP.&nbsp

Perturbance: Unifying Research on Emotion, Intrusive Mentation and Other Psychological Phenomena with AI

Intrusive mentation, rumination, obsession, and worry, referred to by Watkins as "repetitive thought" (RT), are of great interest to psychology. This is partly because every typical adult is subject to "RT". In particular, a critical feature of "RT" is also of transdiagnostic significance—for example obsessive compulsive disorder, insomnia and addictions involve unconstructive "RT". We argue that "RT" cannot be understood in isolation of models of whole minds. Researchers must adopt the designer stance in the tradition of Artificial Intelligence augmented by systematic conceptual analysis. This means developing, exploring and implementing cognitive-affective architectures. Empirical research on "RT" needs to be driven by such theories, and theorizing about "RT" needs to consider such data. We draw attention to H-CogAff theory of mind (motive processing, emotion, etc.) and a class of emotions it posits called perturbance (or tertiary emotions), as a foundation for the research programme we advocate. Briefly, a perturbance is a mental state in which motivators tend to disrupt executive processes. We argue that grief, limerence (the attraction phase of romantic love) and a host of other psychological phenomena involving "RT" should be conceptualized in terms of perturbance and related design-based constructs. We call for new taxonomies of "RT" in terms of information processing architectures such as H-CogAff. We claim general theories of emotion also need to recognize perturbance and other architecture-based aspects of emotion. Meanwhile "cognitive" architectures need to consider requirements of autonomous agency, leading to cognitive affective architectures

Research process and sleep app design lessons learned from the reflective examination of a sleep study

Introduction   Mobile sleep apps are promising accessible treatment for insomnia. Using them as data collection tools akin to sleep diaries has also been proposed. Most of these apps, however, have not been developed using evidence-based principles; limited research exists on their design as research tools (Bhat et al. 2015) (Yu et al., 2019). In the present study, we explored the opportunities and challenges experienced when using a mobile app for research with our own team’s research study as the unit of analysis. This is an intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995), which can inform other researchers as they use sleep apps in research as an intervention (treatment) or research tool (data collection).  Materials and methods: Data were collected during a larger study, designed to test the effects of serial diverse imagining (Beaudoin et al., 2016), using SomnoTest, on insomnia. Data of 19 controls and 15 insomniacs, aged between 18 and 30 years, were analysed. Participants were assigned to one of two app conditions. Group 1 participants heard a countdown from 99 to 1 and Group 2 were prompted to visualise randomly selected brief scenes read by the app at eight-second intervals. Participants completed a one-week sleep diary while using SomnoTest, during the second week.             This was the first study to analyze SomnoTest data using a qualitative approach involving direct interpretation of participants’ patterns of mobile app usage based on actions recorded (i.e., press start, end, pause, resume, or cancel; time stamp; count of played items), reorganization of usage patterns into tables (visualisation; tabulation), reflection of researchers on their respective experiences in analyzing the data, and the derivation of themes and selection of exemplars based on participants’ usage and researchers’ experiences. Results Our exploration revealed four themes: 1) unreliability of sleep diaries when triangulated against SomnoTest data, given that 9 participants had not used the app as claimed; 2) complex, intensive qualitative analysis is needed to identify valid data in an unstructured data set; 3) importance of visualisation when examining data to uncover patterns; 4) identification of “fans” who continue to use the app after their participation in the study. Our findings reveal that data cleaning involves intensive case-by-case analysis of participant data, which proved challenging with 34 participants and would prove prohibitive for larger scale studies. However, these insights can inform how future sleep studies involving mobile app.  Conclusion The development of an algorithm that can efficiently filter valid data usage patterns would facilitate data analysis and researchers’ experience. This would increase sleep app usability as a treatment and research tool. Developing a process for increasing efficiency in data analysis is necessary to exploit the advantages of large-scale data collection that a sleep app makes possible. Further, informing participants that app data would be triangulated against sleep diary during data collection and analysis might increase the accuracy of the data that participants provide in sleep diaries. Acknowledgements Conflict of Interest  Dr. Beaudoin is president of CogSci Apps (develops SomnoTest, mySleepButton and Hook propductivity apps) and owner of CogZest. References: Beaudoin, L. P., Digdon, N., O’Neill, K. & Racour, G. (2016). Serial diverse imagining task: A new remedy for bedtime complaints of worrying and other sleep-disruptive mental activity.Poster presented at SLEEP 2016 (A joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society). Denver, CO. Morin, C. M., Drake, C. L., Harvey, A. G., Krystal, A. D., Manber, R., Riemann, D., & Spiegelhalder, K. (2015). Insomnia disorder. Nature Reviews Disease Primers, 1, 15026. Allocca, G., Ma, S., Martelli, D., Cerri, M., Del Vecchio, F., Bastianini, S., ... & Blackburn, S. (2019). Validation of\u27 Somnivore\u27, a Machine Learning Algorithm for Automated Scoring and Analysis of Polysomnography Data. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 207

Test beam results of a stereo preshower integrated in the liquid argon accordion calorimeter

This paper describes the construction of an integrated preshower within the RD3 liquid argon accordion calorimeter. It has a stereo view which enables the measurement of two transverse coordinates. The prototype was tested at CERN with electrons, photons and muons to validate its capability to work at LHC ( Energy resolution, impact point resolution, angular resolution, $\pi^o$/$\gamma$ rejection )

Performance of a large scale prototype of the ATLAS accordion electromagnetic calorimeter

A 2 m long prototype of a lead-liquid argon electromagnetic calorimeter with accordion-shaped electrodes, conceived as a sector of the barrel calorimeter of the future ATLAS experiment at the LHC, has been tested with electron and pion beams in the energy range 10 to 287 GeV. A sampling term of 10%/root E(GeV) was obtained for electrons in the rapidity range 0 < eta < 1, while the constant term measured over an area of about 1 m(2) is 0.69%. With a cell size of 2.7 cm the position resolution is. about 4 mm/root E(GeV)