No clear consensus exists in the scientific community of what constitutes efficient dual-tasking abilities. Moreover, the training of executive components has been given increased attention in the literature in recent years. Investigating transferability of cognitive training in a complex task setting, thirty subjects practiced for five days on a Name-Tag task (controls) or a Dual N-Back task (experimental), subsequently being tested on two transfer tasks; the Automated Operation Span and a dual task (Trail Making task + Mathematical Addition task). Dual N-Back training previously transferred to unrelated intelligence tests and in this study is assumed to rely primarily on executive attention. Executive attention, functioning to resolve interference and maintaining task-relevant information in working memory, has previously been linked to fluid intelligence and to dual-tasking. However, no transfer effects were revealed. The length of training may have been too short to reveal any such effects. However, the three complex tasks correlated significantly, suggesting common resources, and therefore having potentials as transfer tasks. Notably, subjects with the highest task-specific improvements performed worse on the transfer tasks than subjects improving less, suggesting that task-specific gains do not directly correlate with any transfer effect. At present, if transfer exists in these settings, data implies that five days of training is insufficient for a transfer to occur. Important questions for future research relates to the necessary conditions for transfer to occur, such as the amount of training, neural correlates, attention, and motivation.

Cognitive and emotional processes both seem to contribute in the production of moral judgments, but how they interact is still under investigation. Greene’s dual-process model suggests that these processes constitute dissociable systems in the brain, which are hypothesized to give rise to two qualitatively different ways of moral thinking characterized by two normative moral theories, consequentialism and deontology. Greene indicates that this research undermine deontology as a normative theory. The empirical investigation of moral judgments implies that the dual-process model only seems to accurately predict and explain moral judgments in moral dilemmas involving physical harmful intentions. Regardless of the models empirical support, the empirical findings in the study of moral judgments could have normative and metaethical implications.

The relationship between positive emotions and school satisfaction was studied in 19 adolescents aged 13,57 to 15,17 years (M=14,45, SD=0,446), of these 50% were female. The subjects were all Caucasian native Swedish speakers. Schools satisfaction, life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect and gratitude was measured at the beginning of the study and again fourteen days later. During the fourteen days, the subjects were given a task to carry out each day. The control condition was asked to list up to five things that had affected them during the last day. The experimental condition was asked to list up to five things they were grateful for in the last day. The results did not show any relationship between positive affect and school satisfaction. It is suggested that the results might be caused by either too little time for the intervention to cause a significant effect, by the subjects failing to carry out the given task each day or by too few subjects to rule out random effects.

Women in general seem to have a complicated relationship with their bodies and their body image. A small percent of the female population develop a serious pathological eating pattern which is characterized by a disturbed image of body size and shape. This disturbance has been investigated by many researchers and the quest of finding the underlying neural correlates has progressed enormously during the last decade. The relationship between disturbed eating patterns and body image distortions is highly complicated. The purpose of this review article is to give an overview of current research literature and scientific results. The aim is to find a framework for the phenomenon of body image distortions among both healthy and non-healthy women. Differences between genders and how food intake affects body image will also be addressed. The focus lies on behavioral traits and the underlying neural correlates, with focus on both the perceptual and the cognitive-affective component.

Studiens syfte var att undersöka om en veckas retentionsintervall påverkar vittnens minnesbild. Vidare undersöks om man kan inkorporera missvisande information i ett vittnesminnesbild och om vittnen minns centrala detaljer i större utsträckning än perifera detaljer.Totalt deltog 17 män och 31 kvinnor i studien. Försökspersonerna fick se en filmsekvens på 1.35 minuter. Vidare fick de fylla i ett frågeformulär med 10 frågor. Efter en veckas retentionsintervall fick försökspersonerna fylla i samma frågeformulär men hälften hade fått en sammanfattning med vilseledande information. Slumpmässig fördelning användes. Resultatet visade att en veckas retentionsintervall inte påverkade minnesbilden men att en delförsökspersoner tog till sig den missvisande informationen och inkorporerade den i sin minnesbild. En större generalisering kan ej genomföras men resultaten påvisar betydelsen av missvisande information samt centrala och perifera detaljer för vittnes utsagor.

Flygledare övervakar alla flygplan som färdas världen över genom att se till attflygplanen håller separationsgränserna. Flygledarna jobbar i pass på cirka en timme ochbyts sedan av, en så kallad positionsöverlämning. Det är viktigt att den som tar överpositionen får all information den behöver för att kunna fortsätta leda flygplanen på ett säkert sätt och eventuellt vidta åtgärder för att säkerställa en välordnad flygtrafik. Incidentrapporter visar att ett oproportionerligt stort antal incidenter sker 5- 15minuter efter en positionsöverlämning. På grund av detta vill LFV undersöka hur positionsöverlämningarna går till för att senare kvalitetssäkra dem. Syftet med denna rapport har varit att beskriva positionsöverlämningar på ATCC Stockholm. Resultatet visar att flygledarna till stor del använder sig av en memorerad checklista som inte skiljer sig mycket från den fysiska de har framför sig och följer därmed ett generellt mönster. Det visar även att det svåra kan vara att upprätthålla uppmärksamheten under alla överlämningarna. Resultaten ger LFV en utgångspunkt till att börja med kvalitetssäkringen. Ur ett akademiskt perspektiv visar resultaten en tillämpning på hurde teorier som används i studien kan appliceras i kontexten positionsöverlämningar mellan flygledare.

Safety is very important for our society. In contrast, it is hard to define what this term really means. Nevertheless, one area that is considered important for safety involves accident prevention. Many methods exist within this area which aims at preventing accidents from happening. One accident prevention method is called ‘The Safety Scanning Tool (SST)’. The study conducted in this thesis aimed at exploring whether the SST could improve the safety understanding of experts from the domain of aviation. The term ‘safety understanding’, as it is used in this thesis, refers to the understanding of central scientific concepts underlying safety. These concepts relate to the area of accident prevention and they were the results of a literature study on safety. Thus, the safety understanding was addressed on two levels of abstraction. The first general abstraction level concerned the basic assumptions for studying an organization’s safety culture relating to Schein’s (1992) framework cited by Guldenmund (2000). This relates to the area of accident prevention in a more general way. The second more specific abstraction level regarded 21 different safety issues important for accident prevention. These originated from the area of resilience engineering. Furthermore, this study was structured as a field experiment using a pre-post test and a within-group design.  In order to measure the different experts’ safety understanding, the data were gathered with the help of two surveys before and after the experts’ used the SST. The SST was applied to two groups of experts. In the first group, they were six people, and, in the second 16. The questions in the surveys were created with the help of the above mentioned literature study on safety. The results were analyzed with the help of the statistics program SPSS. In addition, the results were analyzed with the help of sources from academic literature. These were used in order to determine whether there was an improvement of the safety understanding or not. Based on the results from this study, it can be concluded that undergoing the SST caused several improvements of the experts’ safety understanding. These improvements were found in both groups of experts and on both abstraction levels of the safety understanding. However, one result relating to the basic assumption level in the second group of experts could be interpreted both as an improvement and as a decrease of the safety understanding. The results of this study indicate not only that the SST has the ability to detect safety problems in an early state, before they can develop to the outcome of an accident. It has also the ability to enhance its user’s safety understanding relating to factors important for accident prevention.

The semantic content (i.e., meaning of words) is the essence of retrieved autobiographical memories. In comparison to previous research, which has mainly focused on phenomenological experiences and age distribution of memory events, the present study provides a novel view on the retrieval of event information by addressing the semantic representation of memories. In the present study the semantic representation (i.e., word locations represented by vectors in a high dimensional space) of retrieved memory information were investigated, by analyzing the data with an automatic statistical algorithm. The experiment comprised a cued recall task, where participants were presented with unimodal (i.e., one sense modality) or multimodal (i.e., three sense modalities in conjunction) retrieval cues and asked to recall autobiographical memories. The memories were verbally narrated, recorded and transcribed to text. The semantic content of the memory narrations was analyzed with a semantic representation generated by latent semantic analysis (LSA). The results indicated that the semantic representation of visually evoked memories were most similar to the multimodally evoked memories, followed by auditorily and olfactorily evoked memories. By categorizing the semantic content into clusters, the present study also identified unique characteristics in the memory content across modalities.

One of the main diagnostic criteria for Asperger Syndrome is a severe social impairment (American Psychiatric Association [DSM-IV-TR] 2000), something that has often been connected to a more specific impairment in facial recognition. However, the main diagnostic tool (the DSM-IV-TR) has received much criticism during later years and is soon to be revised (Woodbury-Smith & Volkmar 2009). Among other things, many researchers claim that the diagnosis should be complemented with a sliding scale of severity (Ring, Woodbury-Smith, Watson, Wheelright & Baron-Cohen 2008). The use of facial information is central in the social interaction of humans, evident in the special patterns of visual scanning that people employ for facial stimuli (Yarbus 1967). Because of that, this symptom of Asperger Syndrome has become a high research priority. The impairment in facial recognition has been connected to a bias towards detail based processing (McPartland, Webb, Keehn & Dawson 2010). A recent study also connects this to an unusually high visual acuity, which could result in a disposition to focus on small facial features. In the present study. facial stimuli were prepared to provoke memory conjunction errors. This type of memory error means that a person erroneously claims to recognize a face assembled by pieces of previously shown stimuli. If a person is more prone to do so, that would imply that he or she is more focused on details than on configural information (Danielsson 2006). Two groups were tested, one consisting of non-diagnosed adults and one of adults diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. A test for visual acuity was administered, which was followed by a series of facial recognition tasks. Responses in the latter part were given with a computer mouse, and eye fixations were recorded using a head mounted eye-tracking device. Three hypotheses were formulated. First, persons with AS were expected to perform more poorly in all facial recognition tasks. Second, persons with AS were expected to make more conjunction errors than test group subjects. Finally, persons with AS were expected to display a mean visual acuity significantly higher than that of the test group. However, no significant differences emerged between the groups in relation to either of the hypotheses, and results could not be referred to flaws in the experimental setup. Therefore, these results are taken to display the heterogeneity of the Asperger Syndrome population, and possibly the importance of early training measures to compensate for social impairments.

<p>The great amount of METH abuse all over the world causes enormous social and criminal justice problems. In the human brain the abuse of METH causes implications on both structures and functions given rise to acute as well as long term symptoms. In this essay the effects of METH abuse is described in the manner of the drug mechanism such as the impact on neurotransmitters, structural deficits with decreased and increased volumes and the implication on attention, memory, decision  making and emotions. Results from studies showing brain structural and cognitive impairments in METH abusers and in prenatal METH exposed children.</p>