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Background We hypothesized that measures of common carotid artery echolucency and grayscale texture features were associated with cardiovascular disease ( CVD ) risk factors and could predict CVD events. Methods and Results Using a case‐cohort design, we measured common carotid artery ultrasound images from 1788 participants in Exam 1 of the MESA study (Multi‐Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis) to derive 4 grayscale features: grayscale median, entropy, gray level difference statistic‐contrast, and spatial gray level dependence matrices‐angular second moment. CVD risk factor associations were determined by linear regression. Cox proportional hazard models with inverse selection probability weighting and adjustments for age, sex, race/ethnicity, CVD risk factors, and C‐reactive protein were used to determine if standardized values for grayscale median, entropy, gray level difference statistic‐contrast, and spatial gray level dependence matrices‐angular second moment could predict incident coronary heart disease, stroke, and total CVD events over a median 13 years follow‐up. Participants were mean ( SD ) 63.1 (10.3) years of age, 52.6% female, 32.1% white, 27.8% black, 23.3% Hispanic, and 16.8% Chinese. There were 283 coronary heart disease, 120 stroke, and 416 CVD events. Several associations of grayscale features with CVD risk factors were identified. In fully adjusted models, higher gray level difference statistic‐contrast was associated with a lower risk of incident coronary heart disease (hazard ratio 0.82, 95% CI 0.71–0.94, p adj =0.005) and CVD events (hazard ratio 0.87, 95% CI 0.77–0.98, p adj =0.018); higher spatial gray level dependence matrices‐angular second moment was associated with a higher risk of CVD events (hazard ratio 1.09, 95% CI 1.00–1.19, p adj =0.044). Conclusions Gray level difference statistic‐contrast and spatial gray level dependence matrices‐angular second moment predicted CVD events independent of risk factors, indicating their potential use as biomarkers to assess future CVD risk.

In two investigations (N = 62 and 59), three- and four-year-old children sometimes disbelieved what they were told about the unexpected contents of a deceptive box, even when they had seen the adult speaker look inside the box before s/he told them what s/he saw, and despite being able to recall the utterance: utterances were treated as unreliable sources of knowledge compared with seeing directly. Those who did believe the utterance were no better at recalling their prior belief about the box's contents (now treated as false), than those who saw inside the box. However using a narrative procedure, we replicated Zaitchik's (1991) result that children are more likely to acknowledge another's belief when they are told about reality, than when they see reality for themselves. We argue that these children were acknowledging alternative rather than false belief.

In three investigations children aged 4–9 years were given a sequence of trials on each of which they experienced pairs of objects which looked the same but felt different (such as full and empty cereal packets) or felt the same and looked different (such as chocolate bars with different coloured wrappers). On each trial the experimenter chose one of the items from a pair and children predicted whether they themselves, or another person or doll, would know which one it was just by seeing it. In two of the three investigations, even the youngest children showed clear evidence of discriminating in their knowledge judgments between the two types of pairs, but nevertheless children frequently overestimated the knowledge to be gained from seeing. Errors of overestimation when the visual input was ambiguous as to feel were correlated with those made when the visual input was ambiguous as to size, suggesting the children's problem was not specific to understanding about the modality‐specific aspect of knowledge. Furthermore, making it easier for children to isolate the visual input from an object from the non‐visual was ineffective in reducing errors of overestimation. These results provide no evidence that children had difficulty imagining or isolating the visual aspect of the chosen object, but suggest that they may fail to realize when the input is ambiguous.