The skill of putting in golf contributes approximately 40 percent to one’s total score making it an important skill to master in golf. One of the critical means of improving putting skill is through practice. The purpose of this study was to: (a) investigate if different practice schedules with different degrees of contextual interference (CI) influenced the participants’ immediate and long-term putting performance, (b) examine if performance changes were associated with concomitant changes in specific kinematic parameters, and (c) assess the cognitions of the participants during various stages of the practice of the putting skill. Twenty-four undergraduate students were randomly assigned to either a blocked or random practice schedule. On Day One each participant practiced putting to three targets (4 ft, 8 ft, and 12 ft distance) for a total of 108 trials (36 trials to each target). On Day Two 30 trials of retention (10 trials to each target) and 10 transfer trials (10 ft distance) were performed. To obtain a kinematic description of the putting action, an OPTOTRAKTM 3020 camera system recorded the 3D movement of the putter. Participants’ cognitions were analyzed from stimulated recall interview data. Random practice participants exhibited poorer putting performance during acquisition compared to their blocked practice counterparts but showed superior performance in retention and transfer tests. While the blocked practice participants had significantly lower variability in the amplitude in the x-dimension for backswing, impact velocity, and putter position at impact (z-dimension) during practice, the random practice participants showed significantly lower variability in the amplitude of the x-dimension for the backswing and downswing, impact velocity, and putter position at impact during the retention and transfer phases. Content analysis of interview data yielded three emergent categories: participant focus, self-evaluation of performance, and benefits of practice. The participants provided evidence of active thought processes during the putting task while receiving little instruction. The blocked group focused more on accuracy while the random group was more focused on judging distance. The lack of recognition about the z-dimension has potential implications for how instruction and feedback might be employed during the learning process.

The impact of instant message interruptions via computer on immediate lecture retention for college students was examined. While watching a 24–minute video of a classroom lecture, students received various numbers of related–to–lecture (“Is consistent use of the eye contact method necessary for success?”) versus not–related–to lecture (“Have you ever missed class because you couldn't find parking?”) instant messages in addition to note taking vs. no note taking. Student self–rating for multitasking ability, typical and maximum instant messaging activity, and classroom computer use were also measured. Contrary to cognitive models of information processing that suggest instant messages will disrupt student retention of lecture information, no effects were found for number of interruptions, presence or absence of notes, or relatedness of interruption on lecture retention. Students’ multitasking self–rating was negatively related to lecture retention. The implications of these results for classroom practice and future research are explored. / text

This report explores various aspects of sentiment mining. The two research goals for the report were: (1) to determine useful methods in increasing recall of negative sentences and (2) to determine the best method for applying sentence level classification to the document level. The methods in this report were applied to the Movie Reviews corpus at both the document and sentence level. The basic approach was to first identify polar and neutral sentences within the text and then classify the polar sentences as either positive or negative. The Maximum Entropy classifier was used as the baseline system in which the application of further methods was explored. Part-of-speech tagging was used for its effectiveness to determine if its inclusion increased recall of negative sentences. It was also used to aid in the handling of negations within sentences at the sentence level. Smoothing was investigated and various metrics to describe the sentiment composition were explored to address goal (2). Negative recall was shown to increase with the adjustment of the classification threshold and was also seen to increase through the methods used to address goal (2). Overall, classifying at the sentence level using bigrams and a cutoff value of one was observed to result in the highest evaluation scores. / text

Personality research has long been an area of interest in the study of consumer behavior. Currently, common practice is to segment prospective audiences by demographic variables (age, gender, and race) instead of psychographics (values, attitudes, personality). In this research, the author investigates the relationship between personality type (introversion/extraversion) and message recall. Using 122 undergraduate and graduate students, recall was examined across two forms of stimulus (incongruent and congruent messages). Results indicated that while there is no relationship between personality type and message recall, there is a relationship between the frequency of advertising messaging and recall. Results are discussed individually by messaging frequency and personality type with further suggestions for future research. / text

The gender-neutral pronoun hen has been added to the Swedish language with the aim to reduce sexism in the language and make language more inclusive. An objection against the implementation of the word is that the word would be cumbersome to read and would take more cognitive capacity to process. The present study examined if that concern is warranted. 209 participants self-paced read five texts with three pronouns each. Participants were randomly distributed to conditions containing only hen, he/she, she, or he as pronouns. No difference was found between reading speed in the condition containing hen as a pronoun in comparison with the conditions using han, hon or han/hon. No overall difference in memory recall was found either. However, sexism was found to be a moderator for memory recall when reading a text including hen, leading to lower memory recall for individuals scoring high on modern sexism.

Ten male and 10 female participants were presented with six narrative paragraphs and six 10 word lists. Three of the paragraphs were emotional and three were neutral. Each of the paragraphs contained 20 information units and each word list included five neutral and five emotional words. Immediately following paragraph or word list presentation, the participants were asked to recall the stimuli. The mean percent of emotional units (i.e. units of information recalled from emotional paragraphs) recalled was significantly greater than the mean percent of neutral units recalled. Similarly, the mean percent emotional words recalled from word lists was significantly greater than the mean percent neutral words recalled from word lists. Percent recall was significantly greater for words than for paragraphs for both emotional and neutral stimuli. Results supported the hypothesis that emotional saliency increases verbal recall. / text

This trip reporting and GPS-based prompted-recall travel survey was undertaken to provide a better understanding of (a) demographic and behavioural differences between students with a home telephone land line and students without one (b) effects of carrying a GPS device on trip reporting (c) differences in trips reported and confirmed through a prompted-recall survey, and (d) performance of the TRIPS platform. The survey was designed and conducted at the University of Toronto between November 2008 and April 2009. It targeted mostly university students and returned 90 valid interviews. Participants were required to carry a GPS device with them for the two days surveyed. They were then asked to report their trips first, and then to confirm their recorded trips through the web-based prompted-recall tool, TRIPS. Preliminary analysis was conducted based on the reported data, and improvements to the TRIPS platform have been suggested.

This trip reporting and GPS-based prompted-recall travel survey was undertaken to provide a better understanding of (a) demographic and behavioural differences between students with a home telephone land line and students without one (b) effects of carrying a GPS device on trip reporting (c) differences in trips reported and confirmed through a prompted-recall survey, and (d) performance of the TRIPS platform. The survey was designed and conducted at the University of Toronto between November 2008 and April 2009. It targeted mostly university students and returned 90 valid interviews. Participants were required to carry a GPS device with them for the two days surveyed. They were then asked to report their trips first, and then to confirm their recorded trips through the web-based prompted-recall tool, TRIPS. Preliminary analysis was conducted based on the reported data, and improvements to the TRIPS platform have been suggested.

The present thesis deals with the determinants of good memory performance. A more specific objective of the thesis was to examine prerequisites for successful recall performance from the point of view of cue effectiveness. The concept of cue effectiveness was proposed as a superordinate construct underlying the act of remembering in general as well as,exceptional memory performance. It was argued that to the extent that effective cues are provided when retrieval is attempted, good recall would be obtained even without use of specific mnemonic systems. Two characteristics of cue effectiveness were assumed to determine the level of recall performance. First, a retrieval cue has to provide a compatible description of the information encoded, and second, an optimal cue is the one that also represents a distinctive description of that information. Provided that these two characteristics of cue effectiveness are fullfilled, successful recall was expected to occur. In order to optimize cue efficiency an experimental paradigm was introduced. The main feature of the self-generation paradigm is that, in contrast to traditional cued-recall experiments, subjects are provided with cues, which according to the individual's own conceptualization constitute an appropriate description of the previously encoded information. The four studies composing the empirical section of the thesis, demonstrated, first, that self-generated cues serve as extremely powerful retrieval aids. Secondly, it was demonstrated that compatibility and distinctiveness may be the cardinal concepts underlying the empirical phenomenon per se and the essence of the notion of cue effectiveness. Finally, it was proposed that the methodological contribution is of such a nature that it may apply successifully to more practical situations. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Univ. 1986, härtill 4 uppsatser</p> / digitalisering@umu

Adolescence proves to be one of the most vulnerable development stages in the life of humans and therefore dietary assessment of this group is important, but complex. This is due to rapid growth during puberty and the development of new eating patterns that influence dietary intake. Adequate dietary intake in this age group is crucial, since adverse effects such as iron deficiency anemia, inadequate growth and dental caries can occur. Furthermore, dietary imbalance is a significant risk factor that can lay the groundwork for developing preventable complications in late adolescence and adult life such as non-communicable chronic diseases including obesity and diabetes mellitus type II and certain cancers, all leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Given the vulnerability of adolescents in terms of dietary intake, understanding their dietary intake is crucial. Dietary assessment of adolescents is influenced by social, physiological and psychological changes making accurate measurement of this group difficult. Hence, it is of fundamental importance to find a golden standard in terms of a dietary assessment method to use in this group. Several international studies investigated validity and reproducibility of the dietary intake of adolescents, measured with different dietary assessment methods. However, in South Africa only three validity and reproducibility studies have been published and none of them focused exclusively on adolescents. Since the validity of the results of dietary assessment methods of international studies cannot be extrapolated to South African black adolescents, this study emanated from the need to investigate whether multiple 24-hour recalls are valid and reproducible when used to assess the dietary intakes of black adolescents in a convenience sample of grade eight learners from a high school in a township in the North West Province. The study was nested in the multidisciplinary "Physical, Activity in the Young" (PLAY) study. Firstly, the optimal number of 24-hour recalls was determined by calculation of reproducibility coefficients for energy, selected nutrients and food groups. Results showed that four repeated 24-hour recalls provided the optimal reproducibility for black peri-urban South African adolescents. Secondly, the search for a reference method to compare energy intake against energy expenditure led to an investigation into basal metabolic rate equations and physical activity factors with the intention of estimating the energy expenditure. Validity of reported energy intake assessed by multiple 24-hour recalls and estimated energy expenditure was tested using the Pearson correlation coefficient and the dependent t-test. The Pearson correlation test revealed low associations between energy intake and energy expenditure for boys (0.32) and girls (0.17), while the dependent t-test of the energy intake between the different measured occasions showed little difference, which could be explained by the high within participant variation and lower variation between the different participants. The low correlation coefficients showed that there was no association between reported energy intake and mean estimated energy expenditure; thus also no agreement. As a result, multiple 24-hour recalls measured over two years with only five 24-hour recalls did not give a valid measurement of the energy intake of black peri-urban adolescents. Lastly, the ratio of reported energy intake over energy expenditure was evaluated against the energy cut-off points, specifically calculated for age and ethnic group. It indicated that 85% of the participants underreported their energy intake. These results could have been influenced by the estimated basal metabolic rate equations that could have estimated the basal metabolic rate of this group incorrectly or could be due to the inability of the group to recall their physical activity levels correctly. Therefore it is recommended that further validity studies regarding dietary intake need to be performed on adolescents. It is suggested that energy expenditure as a reference method should be measured by using a calorimeter or the doubly labeled water method and then compared with the reported energy intake. Analysing different biochemical determinants of nutritional intake could also be used as an objective reference method to assess the validity of dietary data obtained from questionnaires. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Dietetics)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.