OBJECTIVE To examine the individual and combined associations of ApoE and MTHFR 677C/T polymorphisms with cognitive performance in adolescents. STUDY DESIGN The study comprised 412 Spanish adolescents (13 to 18.5 years of age). Cognitive performance (verbal, numeric and reasoning abilities, and an overall score) was measured by the Spanish-version of the SRA-Test of Educational-Ability. RES...

Being in the numeric minority (e.g., being a solo woman in a group of men) influences how well a person performs within a work group. But being the solo member is only one way in which people can be atypical in a group; a person can also represent a social or demographic category that has not typically been associated with the task that the group is working on. Using a design with four categori...

BACKGROUND High talker variability (i.e., multiple voices in the input) has been found effective in training nonnative phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that children also benefit from high-variability phonetic training with some evidence that they show greater learning (more plasticity) than adults given matched input, although results are mixed. However, no study...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate if addition of educational cartoon to pediatric bowel preparation instructions improves the quality of bowel preparation and patient experience. METHODS Patients were randomized to control group receiving standard bowel preparation instructions or intervention group receiving additional educational cartoon. To objectively rate bowel preparation, a blinded endoscopist com...

BACKGROUND Our objective was to evaluate the measurement properties of the Pain Stages of Change Questionnaire (PSOCQ) and its four subscales Precontemplation, Contemplation, Action and Maintenance. METHODS A total of 231 patients, median age 42 years, with chronic musculoskeletal pain responded to the 30 items in PSOCQ. Thresholds for item scores, and unidimensionality and invariance of the ...

In the course of an ongoing research project testing numerical accuracy of statistical techniques and software frequently used by political scientists we replicate two studies, Nagler (1994) and Alvarez and Brehm (1995). We find numeric inaccuracies, errors in formulas, and data problems that reduce the strength of the substantive conclusions of the studies. Our replication analyses reveal ther...

A curvilinear pattern among a series of visual items (e.g., dots) can be regarded as a kind of probabilistic inference, in which each consecutive angle, regarded independently, is more nearly collinear than would be expected by chance alone. This paper investigates judgments of curvilinearity as a function of the joint distribution of successive inter-dot angles. Subjects were asked to classify...

Human-caused climate change is happening; nearly all climate scientists are convinced of this basic fact according to surveys of experts and reviews of the peer-reviewed literature. Yet, among the American public, there is widespread misunderstanding of this scientific consensus. In this paper, we report results from two experiments, conducted with national samples of American adults, that test...

Data from published studies and World Wide Web sources were combined to develop a regression model to predict (137)Cs concentration ratios for saltwater fish. Predictions were developed from 1) numeric trophic levels computed primarily from random resampling of known food items and 2) K concentrations in the saltwater for 65 samplings from 41 different species from both the Atlantic and Pacific...

Several recent studies on both the development of counting and working-memory span tasks have provided results that could be interpreted as ruling out any cognitive resource model for counting. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that, even in adults, counting is a demanding task that requires the allocation of cognitive resources. In a first experiment, we asked adults to count ar...