BACKGROUND: Few if any medical schools have a comprehensive surgical skills program taking medical students from learning basic knot tying and surgical skills to performing these skills at a level adequate for function during a primary care, surgical, or subspecialty residency. We have designed and continue to refine a program, ...

BACKGROUND:: Despite increasing specialization of craniofacial surgery, certain craniofacial techniques are widely applicable. The authors identified five such craniofacial techniques and queried American Society of Plastic Surgeons members and plastic surgery program directors regarding their comfort level with the procedures and their opinion on resident training for these selected procedures. ...

Abstract To investigate the association between attainment of training milestones by 2-year-old horses with racing outcomes in a population of Standardbred racehorses in New Zealand. Retrospective records of the 2001/2002-born Standardbred foals were obtained. The three training milestones used were: registered with a trainer, entered in a trial, and competed ...

This study investigates whether psychosocial work characteristics and work-related psychological states predict return to work (RTW) after long-term sickness absence among eldercare staff. We followed 9947 employees in a national register on payment of sickness-absence compensation for 1 year and found that 598 employees had absence periods of 8 or ...

We compared the effect of D-cycloserine (DCS) on immediate (10 min after conditioning) and delayed (24 h after conditioning) extinction of learned fear in rats. DCS facilitated both immediate and delayed extinction when the drug was administered after extinction training. However, DCS did not facilitate immediate extinction when administered prior ...

Two experiments explored the role of ambiguity on context processing by using relative stimulus validity designs in human predictive learning. Two groups of participants were trained with 2 stimulus compounds (XY and XZ). In Group TD (true discrimination), compound XY was always followed by the outcome, whereas compound XZ was ...

There are at least two distinct oscillatory states of the hippocampus that are related to distinct behavioral patterns. Theta (4-12 Hz) oscillation has been suggested to indicate selective attention during which the animal concentrates on some features of the environment while suppressing reactivity to others. In contrast, sharp-wave ripples ( ...

Pigeons, capuchin monkeys and rhesus monkeys were trained in nearly identical same/different tasks with an expanding 8-item training set and showed qualitatively similar functional relationships: increasing novel-stimulus transfer (i.e., concept learning) as a function of the training-set size and the level of transfer eventually becoming equivalent to baseline training performance. ...

The existence of relative pitch perception in animals is difficult to demonstrate, since unlike humans, animals often attend to absolute rather than relative properties of sound elements. However, the results of the present study show that ferrets can be trained using relative pitch to discriminate two-tone sequences (rising vs. falling). ...

Signal detection theory (SDT) parameters can describe a learner's ability to discriminate (d') normal from abnormal and the learner's criterion (λ) to under or overcall abnormalities. To examine the serial changes in SDT parameters with serial exposure to radiological cases. 46 participants were recruited for this study: 20 medical students ...

The fish stick is an easy-to-use device for conditioning fish under classroom conditions. It is constructed from inexpensive plastic pipe available at most hardware stores and uses electronic components available at retail electronics outlets. Fish press a nipple for baby food which can be brought under stimulus control using lights, ...

A critical cue for figure-ground assignment in humans is area: smaller regions are more likely to be perceived as figures than are larger regions. To see if pigeons are similarly sensitive to this cue, we trained birds to report whether a target appeared on a colored figure or on a ...

Adult male mice (strain C57Bl/6J) were trained to execute nose-poke responses for water reinforcement; then they were randomly assigned to either of two groups: olfactory discrimination training (exposed to two odours with reward contingent upon correctly responding to one odour) or pseudo-training (exposed to two odours with reward not contingent ...

Interval schedules of reinforcement are known to generate habitual behavior, the performance of which is less sensitive to revaluation of the earned reward and to alterations in the action-outcome contingency. Here we report results from experiments using different types of interval schedules of reinforcement in mice to assess the effect ...

This experiment assessed the effects of training history on resurgence in three college students. Four-choice arbitrary-matching-to-sample trials occurred in two components of a multiple schedule. An A1 or A2 sample stimulus and four (B) comparison stimuli occurred on AB trials, and a C1 or C2 sample stimulus and four (D) ...

[This corrects the article on p. e1000586 in vol. 5.].

Training-induced improvements on perceptual skills can be attributed to at least two learning types: learning of general aspects of the trained condition (conceptual learning) and learning of specific feature values of the stimulus used in training (stimulus learning). Here we asked whether conceptual and stimulus learning on interaural time difference ...

Learning to discriminate stimuli can alter how one distinguishes related stimuli. For instance, training an individual to differentiate between two stimuli along a single dimension can alter how that individual generalizes learned responses. In this study, we examined the persistence of shifts in generalization gradients after training with sounds. University ...

DESPAIR (DESign for PAIRs) is a computer program useful for designing a two-stage linkage study using relative pairs for a dichotomous phenotype. It determines the optimal two-stage study design - i.e., for specified power and significance level, how many pairs of relatives should be studied, how many equally spaced markers ...

In the blocking paradigm, subjects receive reinforced presentations of a compound, AX, after reinforced presentations of A alone. Following this training, responding to X is often diminished relative to a control group, which did not receive the prior training with A. Standard associative theories of learning such as the Rescorla-Wagner ...

Learning is known to cause alterations in intrinsic cellular excitability but, to date, these changes have been seen only after multiple training trials. A powerful learning task that can be quickly acquired and extinguished with a single trial is fear conditioning. Rats were trained and extinguished on a hippocampus-dependent form ...

There is evidence that pigeons prefer conditioned reinforcers that are preceded by greater effort over those that are preceded by less effort (an effect that has been attributed to within-trial contrast). In past research the probability of reinforcement for correct choice of the conditioned reinforcer has been 100%, however, the ...

Mother-pup interactions constitute an important component of environmental stimulation of the offspring during the neonatal period. Employing maternal contact as either a positive reinforcer or, its denial, as a frustrative, non-rewarding stimulus, we developed a novel experimental paradigm involving learning by rat neonates of a T-maze. When trained under the ...

New neutral gauge bosons (Z' 's) are predicted by many models of physics beyond the standard electroweak theory. It is possible that a Z' will be discovered by the Large Hadron Collider program. The next step would be to measure its properties to identify the underlying theory that gave rise ...

Two procedures commonly used to study choice are concurrent reinforcement and probability learning. Under concurrent-reinforcement procedures, once a reinforcer is scheduled, it remains available indefinitely until collected. Therefore reinforcement becomes increasingly likely with passage of time or responses on other operanda. Under probability learning, reinforcer probabilities are constant and independent ...

We studied transposition in pigeons by training them to select the smaller (or the larger) of a pair of circles. In training, different groups of pigeons were given one pair, two pairs, or three pairs of circles along the size dimension. Testing included two stimulus pairs for which, according to ...

Rats were given exposure either to an odor (almond) or a compound of odor plus taste (almond plus saline), prior to training in which the odor served as the conditioned stimulus. It was found, for both appetitive and aversive procedures, that conditioning was retarded by preexposure (a latent inhibition effect), ...

In an experiment involving a new behavioural preparation the role played by similarity in discrimination learning was examined using visual patterns (i.e., paintings) that might share common elements (specifically, A, BC, and ABC). A-C were small stars of three specific colours (target colours), which were intermixed with other stars of ...

This correspondence presents a two-stage classification learning algorithm. The first stage approximates the class-conditional distribution of a discrete space using a separate mixture model, and the second stage investigates the class posterior probabilities by training a network. The first stage explores the generative information that is inherent in each class ...

Three experiments examined inhibitory learning in rats, using Pavlovian and differential inhibitory eyeblink conditioning procedures. Experiment 1 was designed to compare summation and retardation effects following Pavlovian conditioned inhibition (A+/XA-) or differential inhibition (A+/X-) training using auditory and visual conditioned stimuli (CSs). After ten 100-trial sessions of training, both Pavlovian ...

INTRODUCTION: Hiring discrimination in the workplace is defined as failure or refusal by an employer to engage a qualified applicant as an employee due to the existence or consequence of disability. The specific intent of this study is to determine what differentiates an allegation (perception of discrimination) from an actual ...

This study examines the differences in openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion between online game players and nonplayers using a student sample. The matched sample comprised 130 pairs of students, who are paired in gender and age. The results indicate that online game players reported higher scores in openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion ...

Although memory researchers know about primacy and recency effects, it is unclear whether students are aware of these effects and incorporate them when making judgments of learning (JOLs). The present research examined how participants use serial position information (extrinsic cues) when making JOLs after studying each item and showed that ...

Despite the fact that insect learning capacity has been broadly demonstrated, the role that this process plays during mate searching has been scarcely explored. We studied whether the sexual behaviour of a male parasitic wasp can be conditioned to the odours from two alternative host plant complexes (HPCs) present during ...

The influences of both predator density and elapsed time between initial infestation and introduction of predators were determined for suppression of bruchids infesting stored grain legumes by Xylocoris flavipes (Reuter) (Hemiptera: Anthocoridae). Predator density treatments consisted of zero, one, two, three, or five male:female pairs of adult X. flavipes added ...

Perceptual relativity has become a central issue in animal psychophysics. In order to assess how the interplay of training experience and stimulus dimension might affect perceptual relativity, we investigated the role of 'absolute' and 'relative' training on the learning and representation of stimuli from two dimensions that might favor absolute ...

In two experiments, rats received minimal (16) pairings of one auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) cue with a sucrose reinforcer, and extensive (112) pairings of another auditory CS with that reinforcer. After sucrose was devalued by pairing it with lithium chloride in some rats (Devalue groups) but not others (Maintain groups), ...

To evaluate the Swedish version of the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Code (MITI), MITI coding was applied to tape-recorded counseling sessions. Construct validity was assessed using factor analysis on 120 MITI-coded sessions. Discriminant validity was assessed by comparing MITI coding of motivational interviewing (MI) sessions with information- and advice-giving sessions as ...

In two experiments, human participants performed a causal judgment task that simultaneously comprised two reciprocal patterning discriminations and a biconditional discrimination. They learned both patterning discriminations more quickly than the biconditional discrimination. Postdiscrimination tests were used to identify participants who had, or had not, learned to apply the patterning rules, ...

This study assessed whether attendance rates in a workplace predicted subsequent outcome of employment-based reinforcement of cocaine abstinence. Unemployed adults in Baltimore methadone programs who used cocaine (N=111) could work in a workplace for 4 hr every weekday and earn $10.00 per hour in vouchers for 26 weeks. During an ...

Given that students typically have a sizeable amount of course material to learn but a finite amount of study time, evaluating the efficiency of study schedules is important. We explored the efficiency of various schedules of distributed retrieval plus restudy. Across two experiments, 227 undergraduates were asked to learn Swahili-English ...

The purpose of this study was to validate the Caregiver Mealtime and Dysphagia Questionnaire (CMDQ). The validation procedures included the following: (a) assessment of internal consistency reliability, (b) testing of approximations to normality, and (c) assessments of convergent and discriminant validity. Study participants were 85 noncompliant and 50 compliant caregivers. ...

Pigeons were trained to respond to two alternating concurrent reinforcement schedules. The reinforcement probabilities were .05 and .10 in one component, and .10 and .20 in the other. In one condition, the pigeons received training on a discrete-trial procedure in which the keylights remained illuminated for 5s or until a ...

The present model outlines the mechanisms underlying habitual control of responding and the ways in which habits interface with goals. Habits emerge from the gradual learning of associations between responses and the features of performance contexts that have historically covaried with them (e.g., physical settings, preceding actions). Once a habit ...

In kidney paired donation (KPD), incompatible pairs exchange kidneys so that each recipient receives a compatible organ. This modality is underutilized partly because of the difficulty of finding a suitable match among incompatible pairs. Alternatively, recipients with compatible donors might enter KPD arrangements in order to be matched with a ...

We report a series of 7 experiments examining the interaction between visual perception and action programming, contrasting 2 neuropsychological cases: a case of visual extinction and a case with extinction and optic ataxia. The patients had to make pointing responses to left and right locations, whilst identifying briefly presented shapes. ...

OBJECTIVE: To assess whether the Entropy Module (GE Healthcare, Helsinki, Finland), a device to measure hypnosis in anesthesia, is a valid measure of sedation state in critically ill patients by comparing clinically assessed sedation state with Spectral Entropy DESIGN: Prospective observational study. SETTING: Teaching hospital general ICU. PATIENTS AND PARTICIPANTS: ...

This correspondence presents a two-stage classification learning algorithm. The first stage approximates the class-conditional distribution of a discrete space using a separate mixture model, and the second stage investigates the class posterior probabilities by training a network. The first stage explores the generative information that is inherent in each class ...

The present study assessed whether prior reinforcement experiences were related to gaming machine choice and the decision to change gaming machines during a session of gambling. Seventy undergraduate students (48 women, 22 men; mean age = 22.05 years) were presented with two visually identical simulated gaming machines in a practice ...

In Stage 1 of 4 experiments in which rats completed a water-maze blocking procedure, experimental groups were trained to use a predictive beacon (hanging above, connected to, or displaced from the platform) to find a submerged escape platform in the presence of predictive or irrelevant background cues and in the ...