Investigou-se a validade do método recordatório de 24 horas, comparando-o com o método de pesagem dos alimentos. A comparação levou em conta alguns atributos do entrevistado (idade, sexo, nível de instrução e ocupação) e do entrevistador (técnico e não técnico) considerando, ainda, o tempo de duração das entrevistas do método recordatório de 24 horas. Verificou-se, além disso, a capacidade desse método na identificação de fatores de risco. Para isso, pesquisou-se o consumo de alimentos, obtendo-se energia e macronutrientes e alguns micronutrientes de 100 indivíduos de 19 anos e mais, de ambos os sexos, residentes no Distrito de Caucaia do Alto, Municipio de Cotia, Estado de São Paulo. Foi elaborado, especificamente para este trabalho, material de apoio, que constituiu de álbum de fotografias de alimentos (com porções diversificadas em vários tamanhos) preparados de acordo com os hábitos alimentares levantados na mesma comunidade, em estudo piloto, acompanhado de lista de equivalência de medidas caseiras e pesos. Considerando energia e nutrientes, os resultados no método recordatório subestimaram a energia, glicídios, ferro e proteínas, para o sexo masculino em alguns grupos etários. Considerando a diferença entre os dois sexos, estas foram significantes para proteínas e glicídios no sexo masculino do grupo etário de 41 a 60 anos. Verificou-se na comparação dos dois métodos, quanto às características do entrevistado, que seu desempenho no recordatório está mais relacionado à idade e sexo do que ao grau de instrução e ocupação. Quanto aos entrevistadores, os não técnicos apresentaram maior percentual de discordâncias no almoço e no jantar. Entrevistas realizadas em tempo inferior a 15 minutos propiciaram mais erros, tanto por omissão como por adição de alimentos. Na identificação de fatores de risco dietético, o método recordatório de 24 horas não conseguiu identificar todos os individuos com alto grau de sensibilidade, como o método de pesagem. / The validity of the 24-hours recall method was investigated compared with the method of the direct weighing of the foodstuffs consumed. The comparison took into consideration some of the data regarding the person interviewed (age, sex, schooling and occupation) and of the interviewer (technician or non-technician) and also considered the duration of the interviews of the 24-hours recall method. Further, the ability of this method to detect risk factors was also taken into consideration. For this purpose, the actual consumption of foodstuffs was researched, thus identifying energy, macro-nutrients and some micro-nutrients, of 100 individuals of 19 years or more of age, of both sexes, resident in the Caucaia do Alto district, Cotia county, São Paulo State. Was prepared especially for this research, pictures of food portions and the list of domestic measures and weight correspondent got from the same community by a previous study. With regard to energy and nutrients, the results of the recall method, underestimated energy, carbohydrates, iron and proteins for the male sex for some age groups. As for the difference between the sexes, there were significant differences for proteins and carbohydrates for the male sex age group of 40 to 60 years. It was discovered that the person interviewed performance in the 24-hours recall method, in terms of age and sex, was better than terms of schooling and occupation. Among the interviewers, the non-technicians showed more errors in lunch and dinner data. The interviews carried out in under 15 minutes contained more errors, whether by omission or by additioin of foodstuffs. In the identification of dietetic risk factors, the 24 hours - recall method didn\'t show a high degree of sensibility as the method of the direct weighing of food.

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No description available.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of time-compressed narration and representational adjunct images on undergraduate college students' 1) ability to recall and recognize information in a multimedia learning environment, and 2) overall satisfaction with this type of learning environment. The goals of this research were to shed light on time-compression technology incorporated into multimedia learning environments, help fill the existing gap in the research literature by merging two disjoint bodies of research, and aid instructors and instructional designers to better understand time-compression technology while creating rigorous multimedia materials. This research was guided by the underlying principles of multimedia learning. The experiment was a 4 Audio Speeds (1.0 = normal vs. 1.5 = moderate vs. 2.0 = fast vs. 2.5 = fastest rate) x Adjunct Image (Image Present vs. Image Absent) factorial design. Audio speed and adjunct image both served as between subject conditions. Cued-recall, content recognition and learner satisfaction served as the dependent measures. Multimedia interventions were developed to execute this design. A total of 305 research participants were recruited from a public, southeastern university in the United States in this study. Fifty-five percent of the participants were male and 92% indicated that English was their primary language. Forty-nine percent of the participants were junior classification, 4% were freshman, 19% were sophomore, 26% were seniors, with the remaining indicating other. The median age of the participants was 22, and ranges in age from 18 to 53 years old. Data were analyzed using a series of factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedures. Results showed statistically significant differences at 2.5 times the normal audio speed, in which performance on cued-recall and content recognition tasks was significantly lower than other audio speeds. Furthermore, representational adjunct images had a significant positive effect on cued-recall, but not content recognition. Participants in the normal audio speed and picture present groups were significantly more satisfied than other treatments. Recommendations for future research are provided as well as advice for instructors, instructional designers and learners interested in time-compression technology.

Even though there are many views on consciousness theory in the pertinent literature, there remains a need for a unifying framework for specifying the features of specific states of consciousness. In order to know what kinds of experiences conscious states have in common, researchers need to elicit testimony that is more direct and finer-grained than has been previously available. This dissertation endeavors to fill a gap in current research by addressing concepts and methods for making requisite distinctions. This research illuminates the question of whether specific states of consciousness can be reliably and validly distinguished from each other. In order to do this, 41 individuals, who had experienced significant peak or ecstatic states from a variety of induction methods (most prominently by ingestion of psychedelic substances), were invited to be interviewed. The interview was designed as a conversational-type synthesis of 5 well-known questionnaires pertinent to states of consciousness, but without their explicit and implicit assumptions; that is, the volunteers' responses would not conform to predetermined questions. Encoding their responses allowed me to develop a model that helped to answer the research question ("Are there identifiable features that can reliably and validly distinguish among states of consciousness thought to be distinct from each other?") by formulating a model in which any given conscious state can be catalogued in terms of its component factors (background, resistances, setting, induction, tradition, energies, and breakthrough events). The results of this study provide much-needed insights into people's internal experiences of their various states, thus forming a basis for improved treatments and analyses. Better understanding of these states can be an impetus for social change by allowing for more incisive analyses and treatments, and also enabling more understanding of other people's inner perspectives.

Many students claim that they can study well while listening to music (Anderson & Fuller, 2010; Patton, Stinard, & Routh, 1983), but how does listening to music affect students’ ability to encode and recall studied information? Previous research on background music and attention has revealed mixed results, with some studies indicating that background music can help reduce inattentional blindness (Beanland, Allen, & Pammer, 2011), while others suggest that music may hinder the attention of the listener (by Shih, Huang, & Chaing, 2012). Additionally, individual differences in working memory capacity impact one’s ability to store and retrieve information, as well as to suppress any intrusive thoughts and ignore distractions (Cowan et al., 2005; Rosen & Engle, 1998). The purpose of the present study was to determine if the musical components of polyphony and homophony impact students’ ability to encode and recall information, while accounting for the impact of working memory capacity. Participants were randomly assigned to one of five musical conditions: simplistic without lyrics, simplistic with lyrics, complex without lyrics, complex with lyrics, or control (silence). In each condition, participants studied Swahili English word pairs, then completed a verbatim recall test. Higher working memory capacity was associated with recalling more items correctly. The results of the study indicated that there were no significant differences in recall performance due to music condition when accounting for working memory capacity. Potential explanations for the results of this study, as well as implications for future research, are examined.

Recognition memory is thought to rely upon both recollection and familiarity. When people recall an episode from the past it is generally considered to reflect the memory process of recollection. Therefore, if people can successfully recall an item, they should be able to recognize it. However, in cued recall paradigms of memory research, participants sometimes correctly recall a studied target word in the presence of a strong semantic cue but then fail to recognize that word as actually having been studied. This paradox and underlying cognitive processes have been minimally studied by scientists, leaving this phenomenon poorly understood. Extant research has investigated some of the conditions necessary to produce these conditions but not the underlying neural correlates that drive them. The present study builds upon earlier studies using Electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate the neural processes that underlie recognition failures of successfully recalled words. In the present experiment, participants studied words one at a time, and then later were asked to verbally recall these previously studied words as cued by their semantic associates. Following the participant’s verbal response, their recognition memory was tested for the recalled word. The current study aimed to use physiological measures (EEG) to investigate the explicit and implicit cognitive processes that may be involved in the recognition failure of recalled words. The data indicate that successfully recalled words that are recognized are driven by recollection at recall and a combination of recollection and familiarity at recognition, whereas successfully recalled words that are not recognized are instead driven by semantic priming at recall and at recognition, are driven by negative-going ERP effects reflecting implicit processes such as repetition fluency.

<p>Recurrent stress has been found to impair brain structures essential to memory. The cognitive reserve model suggests that physical activity supplies protection against memory decline in neuropathologies. The purpose of the present study was to explore whether leisure physical activity modifies the predicted negative effect stress has on memory. A sub-sample derived from the Betula Study comprised 267 participants between 50 and 65 years. Memory was assessed by a SPT free recall and stress by a self-report. Low and High frequency exercisers were analyzed separately. After age, sex and education were controlled for in hierarchical regression, results showed that stress significantly improved memory performance in Low exercisers but no significant effect in High exercisers. Thus, frequency of physical activity did not explain variation in memory performance. However, higher age did not have a negative influence on memory performance for the High exercisers.</p>

<p>Verbal information has predominantly been the to-be-remembered materials in human memory research for more than a century. In recent years some interesting deviations from the established rules of verbal memory have been observed in subjects who have been asked to motorically self-perform (enact) action sentences at the encoding phase of the memory task, instead of only hearing or reading them as in a traditional verbal task (VT). Marked enhancements in recall were also consistently demonstrated in such studies and the effect was named the subject-performed task (SPT) effect. Presently, the body of SPT research is large but little agreement has been reached regarding the mechanism at work in producing the SPT phenomenon. The present thesis addresses two major issues in SPT research. The enhancement of associative information and the significance of the motor component are evaluated. In Study A, the SPT effect was studied in two cued-recall tasks that relied on item-specific association and relational association, respectively. The results showed that SPT encoding interacts with item-specific associative cues at recall to produce a larger SPT effect as compared to free recall. This supports the notion that part of the SPT effect is due to enhanced item-specific association. In Study B, the associative effect in SPT was studied amongst age cohorts comprised of subjects between 40 and 85 years old. Normal age-related decline in episodic memory has elsewhere been suggested to be caused mainly by associative deficits connected with ageing. The results of Study B indicate that the item-specific associative effect in SPT was more age sensitive than recall of VT and the relational associative effect in SPT. In Study C, the question over whether the SPT effect is dependent on motor modality or not was addressed. Self-produced sign language encoding was argued to be qualitatively the same as self-produced oral/verbal encoding, with the motor modality component being the only exception. It was also argued that the motor modality component was the main similarity to performing SPT. Since the signing subjects performed at the same level as the SPT condition at recall, and better than the control conditions (e.g., VT), the conclusion was made that motor activation per se can contribute to memory enhancement in SPT. Whether SPT encoding results in qualitatively different memory traces is discussed as well as the effect of SPT on other types of associative information. The results are also briefly related to other controversies in SPT research. It is concluded, finally, that enactment produces differential effects on different types of associations. The association between verb and noun is clearly enhanced by SPT encoding. Moreover, it is concluded that overt motor activation is necessary for obtaining a full SPT effect. To explore these interactions further and to build upon these conclusions, an increased focus on motor processes and their relation to verbal processes is called for in future cognitive research.</p>

<p>Forskningsområdet för att skapa bra automatiska sammanfattningar har ökat stadigt genom de senaste åren. Detta på grund av den efterfrågan som finns både inom den privata och offentliga sektorn på att kunna ta till sig mer information än vad som idag är möjligt. Man vill slippa sitta och läsa hela rapporter och informationstexter utan istället smidigt kunna läsa en sammanfattning av dessa för att på så sätt kunna läsa fler. För att veta om dessa automatiska sammanfattare håller en bra standard måste dessa utvärderas på något sätt. Ofta görs detta genom att se till hur mycket information som kommer med i sammanfattningen och hur mycket som utelämnas. För att detta ska vara möjligt att kontrollera behövs en så kallad guldstandard, en sammanfattning som agerar som <em>facit</em> gentemot de automatiskt sammanfattade texterna.</p><p>Den här rapporten behandlar ämnet guldstandarder och skapandet av dessa. I projektet har fem guldstandarder på informationstexter från Försäkringskassan skapats och utvärderats med positiva resultat.</p>