Publications by authors named "Maria Robinson"

Research on best practices in theory assessment highlights that testing theories is challenging because they inherit a new set of assumptions as soon as they are linked to a specific methodology. In this article, we integrate and build on this work by demonstrating the breadth of these challenges. We show that tracking auxiliary assumptions is difficult because they are made at different stages of theory testing and at multiple levels of a theory.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In many decision tasks, we have a set of alternative choices and are faced with the problem of how to use our latent beliefs and preferences about each alternative to make a single choice. Cognitive and decision models typically presume that beliefs and preferences are distilled to a scalar latent strength for each alternative, but it is also critical to model how people use these latent strengths to choose a single alternative. Most models follow one of two traditions to establish this link.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Direct Immunofluorescence.

J Clin Aesthet Dermatol

December 2023

Direct immunofluorescence (DIF) is a valuable diagnostic tool in the dermatology clinic. The proper use of a biopsy for DIF is dependent on several factors, including appropriate clinical indication, correct clinical site selection, and proper specimen handling and transport. Improper use of DIF can lead to false negatives, decreased diagnostic yield, and poor resource utilization.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The skin biopsy and histologic examination are an important part of providing dermatologic care. Effective communication with your dermatopathologist on the biopsy requisition form helps provide clinicopathological correlation and facilitates accurate and timely histopathologic diagnosis of the biopsy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

"Dogs" are connected to "cats" in our minds, and "backyard" to "outdoors." Does the structure of this semantic knowledge differ across people? Network-based approaches are a popular representational scheme for thinking about how relations between different concepts are organized. Recent research uses graph theoretic analyses to examine individual differences in semantic networks for simple concepts and how they relate to other higher-level cognitive processes, such as creativity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Ensemble perception is a process by which we summarize complex scenes. Despite the importance of ensemble perception to everyday cognition, there are few computational models that provide a formal account of this process. Here we develop and test a model in which ensemble representations reflect the global sum of activation signals across all individual items.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Visual working memory is highly limited, and its capacity is tied to many indices of cognitive function. For this reason, there is much interest in understanding its architecture and the sources of its limited capacity. As part of this research effort, researchers often attempt to decompose visual working memory errors into different kinds of errors, with different origins.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: In the UK there are around 5400 deaths annually from injury. Tranexamic acid (TXA) prevents bleeding and has been shown to reduce trauma mortality. However, only 5% of UK major trauma patients who are at risk of haemorrhage receive prehospital TXA.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We argue that critical areas of memory research rely on problematic measurement practices and provide concrete suggestions to improve the situation. In particular, we highlight the prevalence of memory studies that use tasks (like the "old/new" task: "have you seen this item before? yes/no") where quantifying performance is deeply dependent on counterfactual reasoning that depends on the (unknowable) distribution of underlying memory signals. As a result of this difficulty, different literatures in memory research (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cognitive control refers to the ability to maintain goal-relevant information in the face of distraction, making it a core construct for understanding human thought and behavior. There is great theoretical and practical value in building theories that can be used to explain or to predict variations in cognitive control as a function of experimental manipulations or individual differences. A critical step toward building such theories is determining which latent constructs are shared between laboratory tasks that are designed to measure cognitive control.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Change detection tasks are commonly used to measure and understand the nature of visual working memory capacity. Across three experiments, we examine whether the nature of the memory signals used to perform change detection are continuous or all-or-none and consider the implications for proper measurement of performance. In Experiment 1, we find evidence from confidence reports that visual working memory is continuous in strength, with strong support for an equal variance signal detection model with no guesses or lapses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Social interactions are dynamic and unfold over time. To make sense of social interactions, people must aggregate sequential information into summary, global evaluations. But how do people do this? Here, to address this question, we conducted nine studies (N = 1,583) using a diverse set of stimuli.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to compare the effectiveness of the i-gel supraglottic airway versus tracheal intubation as the first airway management technique for adults experiencing non-traumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
  • The research was conducted through a randomized controlled trial involving paramedics across four ambulance services in England, with participants automatically enrolled between June 2015 and August 2017.
  • The main outcome measured was the modified Rankin Scale score at hospital discharge or 30 days post-arrest, assessing neurological disability and determining whether the i-gel provided better patient outcomes compared to tracheal intubation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Tranexamic acid (TXA) is an antifibrinolytic drug used to prevent bleeding. It was introduced as an intervention for post-traumatic haemorrhage across emergency medical services (EMS) in the UK during 2012. However, despite strong evidence of effectiveness, prehospital TXA administration rates are low.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Memory for objects in a display sometimes reveals attraction-the objects are remembered as more similar to one another than they actually were-and sometimes reveals repulsion-the objects are remembered as more different from one another. The conditions that lead to these opposing memory biases are poorly understood; there is no theoretical framework that explains these contrasting dynamics. In three experiments (each = 30 adults), we demonstrate that provides a unifying dimension that accommodates the existence of both types of visual working memory interactions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aim: Optimal airway management during out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is uncertain. Complications from tracheal intubation (TI) may be avoided with supraglottic airway (SGA) devices. The AIRWAYS-2 cluster randomised controlled trial (ISRCTN08256118) compared the i-gel SGA with TI as the initial advanced airway management (AAM) strategy by paramedics treating adults with non-traumatic OHCA.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The AIRWAYS-2 trial compared the effectiveness of the i-gel supraglottic airway device versus tracheal intubation for managing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) and faced various challenges during its execution.
  • Research paramedics reflected on their experiences, revealing significant difficulties in recruiting and training staff, screening patients, and managing protocol deviations.
  • Despite conducting a feasibility study beforehand, the trial highlighted that large-scale trials require ongoing engagement with emergency medical service (EMS) clinicians and an adaptable approach to tackle unexpected issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Eyewitness identification through lineup procedures is a crucial form of evidence in criminal cases, but there's conflicting advice on how many fillers (non-suspects) should be included in the lineup.
  • In two experiments, researchers found that the size of the lineup fillers didn't affect diagnostic accuracy, though showups performed worse than simultaneous lineups.
  • The study also explored different decision-making models for lineups, ultimately leaving some questions about which model best explains the results while providing insights for improving lineup procedures and research on eyewitness memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Falls are the most common reason for ambulance callouts resulting in non-conveyance. Even in the absence of injury, only half of those who fall can get themselves up off the floor, often remaining there over an hour, increasing risk of complications. There are recognized techniques for older people to learn how to get up after a fall, but these are rarely taught.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aim: The AIRWAYS-2 cluster randomised controlled trial compared the i-gel supraglottic airway device (SGA) with tracheal intubation (TI) as the first advanced airway management (AAM) strategy used by Emergency Medical Service clinicians (paramedics) treating adult patients with non-traumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). It showed no difference between the two groups in the primary outcome of modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score at 30 days/hospital discharge. This paper reports outcomes to 6 months.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a cognitive structure that temporarily maintains a limited amount of visual information in the service of current cognitive goals. There is active theoretical debate regarding how limits in VSTM should be construed. According to discrete-slot models of capacity, these limits are set in terms of a discrete number of slots that store individual objects in an all-or-none fashion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Psychology and neighboring disciplines are currently consumed with a replication crisis. Recent work has shown that replication can have the unintended consequence of perpetuating unwarranted conclusions when repeating an incorrect line of scientific reasoning from one study to another. This tutorial shows how decision researchers can derive logically coherent predictions from their theory by keeping track of the heterogeneity of preference the theory permits, rather than dismissing such heterogeneity as a nuisance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The most eye-catching feature of Hertwig and Pleskac's (2018) comment is their virtual silence about Regenwetter and Robinson's (2017) core message. Regenwetter and Robinson warn of a logical disconnect between some psychological constructs and certain types of theoretical predictions about human behavior. Scientific "predictions" that do not actually follow from the underlying theory can, in turn, lead to completely uninformative behavioral measures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The research study titled "Cluster randomised trial of the clinical and cost effectiveness of the i-gel supraglottic airway device versus tracheal intubation in the initial airway management of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (AIRWAYS-2)" is a large-scale study being run in the English emergency medical (ambulance) services (EMS). It compares two airway management strategies (tracheal intubation and the i-gel) in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. We describe the methods used to minimise bias and the challenges associated with the set-up, enrolment, and follow-up that were addressed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF