BACKGROUND Quality of life (QoL) is affected in patients with dementia, but it is not clear whether it is already disturbed in more initial phases of cognitive decline, like Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). AIM Compare the QoL in MCI patients with controls without cognitive impairment, and ascertain whether there are differences in the reports of QoL made by the subjects and by their informan...

This study examined how informants' traits affect how children seek information, trust testimony, and make inferences about informants' knowledge. Eighty-one 3- to 6-year-olds and 26 adults completed tasks where they requested and endorsed information provided by one of two informants with conflicting traits (e.g., honesty vs. dishonesty). Participants also completed tasks where they simultaneo...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the reliability, magnitude and direction of the resulting bias in the application of a screening instrument for mental disorders by considering proxy informants in comparison to primary informants. METHODS Data are taken from a general morbidity community-based survey carried out in 520 randomly selected households of an industrial area of the Metropolitan Region of Sal...

Recent evidence demonstrates that children are selective in their social learning, preferring to learn from a previously accurate speaker than from a previously inaccurate one. We examined whether children assessing speakers' reliability take into account how speakers achieved their prior accuracy. In Study 1, when faced with two accurate informants, 4- and 5-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) wer...

BACKGROUND Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) pose ethical challenges for investigators and ethics committees. This study describes the views and experiences of CRT researchers with respect to: (1) ethical challenges in CRTs; (2) the ethics review process for CRTs; and (3) the need for comprehensive ethics guidelines for CRTs. METHODS Descriptive qualitative analysis of interviews conducted wit...

An attractive feature of Prediction Markets (PMs, also called information markets or virtual stock markets) is that they provide economic incentives for informants to share unique information, i.e., information that no other informants possess. This feature and the broad availability of the Internet have lead to applications of prediction markets in a number of fields. Most reported application...

Researchers use multiple informants' reports to assess and examine behavior. However, informants' reports commonly disagree. Informants' reports often disagree in their perceived levels of a behavior ("low" versus "elevated" mood), and examining multiple reports in a single study often results in inconsistent findings. Although researchers often espouse taking a multi-informant assessment appro...

Young children readily act on information from adults, setting aside their own prior convictions and even continuing to trust informants who make claims that are manifestly false. Such credulity is consistent with a long-standing philosophical and scientific conception of young children as prone to indiscriminate trust. Against this conception, we argue that children trust some informants more ...