Responses to a brief six-min screening battery involving high-workload tracking, verbal working memory, and line discrimination tasks were used to predict subsequent performance on a 36-min vigilance task. Two predictors of interest were subjective state, as indexed by the Dundee Stress State Questionnaire (DSSQ), and cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV), measured via transcranial Doppler sonography. The results testify to the importance of assessing task-induced responses for predicting vigilance performance. They also indicate that forecasting vigilance performance is a complex endeavor requiring a set of multidimensional predictors. Specifically, higher post-battery task engagement scores on the DSSQ in this study and higher levels of CBFV in the left hemisphere during performance of the screening battery predicted more correct detections on the subsequent vigilance task. These findings are interpreted in the light of the resource-workload model of vigilance, and their practical significance is discussed.

Objective: To examine the role of blame as a mediator of the relationships between perceiver age and gender and children's acceptance of an overweight peer. Design: Cross-sectional study of children's perceptions of their overweight peers using structural equation modeling. Participants: Two hundred and ninety-one children between the ages of 3 and 11 years. Measurements: Children viewed a videotape of a same-sex peer, dressed to appear overweight, interacting with an adult. After viewing the videotape, children responded to items assessing their perceptions of the child's social and emotional traits and how much the child was to blame for being overweight.Results: Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the traits loaded on a single factor, acceptance. Results of analyses for our structural equation model indicated that as blame increased, acceptance of the peer decreased. The relationships between gender and blame and gender and acceptance were not significant. Children were categorized into three age groups (3-4, 5-8 and 9-11 years) to examine the influence of age. Children between 5 and 8 years of age were less likely to blame the model compared with younger and older children. Conclusion: Preschoolers reported the lowest acceptance, indicating a need for intervention for children in this age range. Furthermore, it will be important to conduct longitudinal studies to determine the influence of interventions as the child passes through different developmental stages.

This study determined if training for accuracy in temporal discrimination would transfer across sensory modalities. A fractionation method was used in which subjects bisected the durations of acoustic and visual signals at three standard intervals (6,12, and 18 sec). Absolute error was the performance index. Half of the subjects were trained with acoustic stimuli and then tested in vision; the remainder were trained in vision and tested in audition. Similar negatively accelerated acquisition functions were noted for both modalities. Positive intermodal transfer, characterized by symmetry across modalities, was obtained at all standard durations. The results were considered to provide support for the notion that a common mechanism underlies temporal discriminations in different sensory systems.

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