Intention-driven illusory behaviors: The importance of detailed vs. gist processing in remembering what you have done and what you have yet to do

Have you ever formed an intention to reply to an email only to find that, after a short passage of time, you cannot remember if you actually did send the email, or simply intended to? The present work examines the effect of gist and detailed processing on the ability to reduce these errors of intention-behavior conflation. As detailed processing involves encoding specific features of an event, we hypothesized that intentions or behaviors encoded in more detail would be more discriminable in memory, and thus, reduce the likelihood of producing intention-driven illusory behaviors. In two experiments, we used a hiring paradigm to posit a means of attenuating this effect. Experiment 1 demonstrated that processing intentions in a detailed manner reduced the proportion of illusory behaviors reported. Experiment 2 showed that this type of processing was most effective when it was done to keep track of behaviors. Methodological limitations of exclusively relying on behavioral data are discussed, as well as future directions to both extend current work to meet the demands of technological advances that reduce the necessity to engage in internal monitoring processes, and explore conditions wherein intention-driven illusory behaviors are actually less likely to occur

It’s a Trap! The Influence of Instrumental Manipulation Checks on Response Non-Differentiation and Gricean Norm Effects

Honors (Bachelor's)Biopsychology, Cognition, and NeurosciencePsychologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107784/1/aashnas.pd

Groundwater Quality in India Distribution, Social Burden and Mitigation Experiences

A variety of quality issues affect groundwater in India. The reasons for these quality problems are rooted to groundwater exploitation, external contamination from point/non-point sources and natural geogenic processes. Biological and chemical contamination of water account for a massive disease burden on society leading to child mortality, labor loss due to recurring disease, chronic ailments, etc. The impact of some of these problems is exacerbated due to current hygiene, malnutrition and poverty status of the people. The key problems can be pointed out as – biological contamination, fluoride, salinity, nitrate and iron problems, and industrial contamination. Apart from these, other quality problems such as strontium, heavy elements, etc., also exist and interact with these wider-spread problems. One of the main challenges we face is the lack of good and vast geological understanding of the distribution of these contaminants. Since the current network of quality measurements is highly insufficient, numerous civil society initiatives have emerged attempting to involve community in monitoring water quality. Some understanding has emerged out of this, but the quality of these measurements and kits are sometimes in question. The social burden of some of these quality problems has been documented by research studies. Problems such as fluorosis impose a massive social cost which can be a significant part of the income. On an already malnutritioned population, fluorosis and arsenicosis add to health complication leading to severity which otherwise would not be observed in healthy individuals. The loss to agricultural productivity from water quality problems arises especially in salinity affected areas. In iron-affected areas, pipes and wells can be affected. Kidney stone, a root cause of which is poor hydration, is also a major health burden. Mitigation measures are possible for each of these quality problems. In many cases, however, there is interaction between quality problems such as those with iron-arsenic-fluoride (Assam), salinity-fluoride (Saurashtra, Gujarat) and say, biological-arsenic (WB). Therefore, we need a region-specific typological approach that considers the particular characteristic problem of the area. There are good successful cases for several of these mitigation issues – watershed-based measures along the coast for salinity in Saurashtra, RO plants in affluent areas across the country, rain water harvesting for assuring safe drinking water, referral hospitals for particular problems such as fluorosis, low cost filters for fluoride, arsenic, etc. As a good response to all these problems, what we need is integration of efforts – across different disciplines such as geology, health, technology and management; across different departments such as public health, water supply, education, rural development; across tiers of the government and Panchayati Raj institutions (PRIs), across public and private institutions. Water quality management needs to enterinto every aspect of governance in order to achieve an overall impact

Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval

Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog

The value of action: An examination of when and how actions are evaluated more positively than inactions

Human behavior varies along a continuum of activity, with demanding behaviors characterizing actions and restful states characterizing inactions. Action and inaction are integral components of daily life, affecting our decision-making, goal pursuit, self-regulation, well-being, and health. Understanding how people conceptualize and evaluate action and inaction is thus important. The present research found that actions are perceived differently than inactions (Studies 1-2). People not only evaluate actions more favorably than inactions (Study 3) but prefer to engage in actions over inactions as well (Study 4). This phenomenon is driven by a natural tendency to think of actions as more intentional (Study 5), but making intentionality salient does not always reduce the bias favoring action (Study 6). Balancing action and inaction is important for healthy human functioning, underlining the importance of further understanding evaluative biases in this domain

Non-traditional growth in large, established firms

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-99).Firms must continuously strive to grow through the creation of new sources of competitive advantage. The challenges to growth are more severe for large, established firms that derive a predominant amount of their present revenue from technology that is mature and that faces imminent substitution through the marketplace emergence of a disruptive technology. In such circumstances, non-traditional growth, through new business opportunities outside of the direct purview of established Strategic Business Units, becomes an imperative. The primary hypothesis of this study is that problems in achieving growth predominantly stem from the inherent rigidities of large, established firms and, in order to successfully grow, these firms will have to pay particular attention to the structures and processes associated with teams tasked with growth. Accordingly, a theoretical framework for classifying non-traditional growth opportunities is developed. The study is motivated using three examples of non-traditional growth projects in a large, established firm. These examples are used to develop three key dimensions for characterizing such opportunities--technology, market, and organization. The proposed framework builds upon structural contingency theories to develop two independent factors for each dimension--uncertainty and interdependence. A vector mapping applicable to all non-traditional growth opportunities is developed using the two factors and three dimensions. The vector mapping is used to propose a linkage between growth opportunity and organizational form. A survey administered to 24 project leaders/managers of non-traditional growth projects in a single, large firm is used to test the applicability of the framework developed here. A statistical(cont.) analysis of the survey results corroborates the significance of market and technology factors. Organizational factors appear to be less significant, but this may be due to artifacts in the data. Finally, a concept explored in this study is that organizations must become more ambidextrous in their ability to use multiple organizational forms, simultaneously, to exploit non-traditional growth opportunities. Implementation considerations relevant to the recommended organizational forms are discussed within the specific product development process framework in a single, large firm.by Suresh Sunderrajan.S.M

Prior exposure to instructional manipulation checks does not attenuate survey context effects driven by satisficing or Gricean norms

"Instructional manipulation checks (IMCs) are frequently included in unsupervised online surveys and experiments to assess whether participants pay close attention to the questions. However, IMCs are more than mere measures of attention - they also change how participants approach subsequent tasks, increasing attention and systematic reasoning. We test whether these previously documented changes in information processing moderate the emergence of response effects in surveys by presenting an IMC either before or after questions known to produce classic survey context effects. When the items precede an IMC, familiar satisficing as well as conversational effects replicate. More important, their pattern and size does not change when the items follow an IMC, in contrast to experiments with reasoning tasks. Given a power of 82% to 98% to detect an effect of d=.3, we conclude that prior exposure to an IMC is unlikely to increase or attenuate these types of context effects in surveys." (author's abstract

Generalized predictive modeling for facilitated transport membranes accounting for fixed and mobile carriers

The present work expands previous modeling knowledge on facilitated transport membranes for olefin/paraffin separation. A new robust and practical mathematical model for the description of light olefin flux in composite polymer/ionic liquid/Ag+ membranes is reported. The model takes into account three different transport mechanisms, i.e., solution-diffusion, fixed-site carrier and mobile carrier transport mechanisms. Fixed-site carrier contribution that appears thanks to the bounding of silver cations with the polymer chains is described through a “hopping parameter”. Furthermore, given that the addition of an ionic liquid to the membrane composition promotes carrier mobility, the inclusion of a dedicated expression is necessary for a realistic description of mobile-carrier transport phenomena. The contribution of each mechanism in weighted based on the membrane composition. In order to check the model suitability, simulated values have been matched to experimental data obtained by continuous flow propane/propylene permeation experiments through PVDF-HFP/BMImBF4/AgBF4 composite membranes, working with 50:50 gas mixtures at different temperature and pressure. The resultant model offers good predictions for olefin flux and provides a very useful tool for process optimization and scaling-up. To our knowledge, this is the first time that mobile and fixed site carrier mechanisms performance are simultaneously modeled considering the influence of temperature, pressure and carrier loading.Financial support from projects CTQ2015-66078-R and CTQ2016-75158-R (MINECO, Spain-FEDER 2014–2020) is gratefully acknowledged. Raúl Zarca also thanks the Universidad de Cantabria for a postgraduate fellowship

Equipping Health Professions Educators to Better Address Medical Misinformation

As part of a cooperative agreement with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Federal Award Identification Number [FAIN]: NU50CK000586), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) began a strategic initiative in 2022 both to increase confidence in COVID-19 vaccines and to address medical misinformation and mistrust through education in health professions contexts. Specifically, the AAMC solicited proposals for integrating competency-based, interprofessional strategies to mitigate health misinformation into new or existing curricula. Five Health Professions Education Curricular Innovations subgrantees received support from the AAMC in 2022 and reflected on the implementation of their ideas in a series of meetings over several months. Subgrantees included the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, the Maine Medical Center/Tufts University School of Medicine, and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. This paper comprises insights from each of the teams and overarching observations regarding the challenges and opportunities involved with leveraging health professions education to address medical misinformation and improve patient health