Relationships among driving styles, desire for control, illusion of control, and self-reported driving behaviors.

Objective: A correlational study examined relationships among driving styles, 4 subfactors of desire for control, illusion of control, accident concern, self-rated likelihood of being involved in an accident, self-rated driving skill, and self-reported accidents, violations, and close calls.

Methods: An online sample of participants ( = 601) completed (1) the Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory (MDSI); (2) the Desirability of Control Scale (DCS); (3) an Illusion of Control Scale; (4) an accident concern self-rating, (5) a 3-item speed questionnaire; (6) a 4-item accidents, violations, and close calls questionnaire; (7) a driving skill self-rating; and (8) a demographic questionnaire. Scales were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis where appropriate.

Simple auditory and visual interruptions of a continuous visual tracking task: modality effects and time course of interference.

Research has produced conflicting evidence regarding whether performance of an on-going visual task is disrupted more by an interruption from a visual or an auditory alert. Tasks and alerts studied to date have been complex or idiosyncratic. This experiment examined how the modality of simple alerts-visual icons or auditory tones-affected performance of an on-going visual task.

Attributions of accidents to "human error" in news stories: Effects on perceived culpability, perceived preventability, and perceived need for punishment.

Attributions of the causes of accidents to human error are problematically reductive, yet such attributions persist in media coverage. Few experiments have examined how human error attributions affect people's perceptions. An experiment compared attributions of accidents to "human error" versus other causes ("mechanical failure," "technical error," or "computer error").

Safer than the average human driver (who is less safe than me)? Examining a popular safety benchmark for self-driving cars.

Unlabelled: Although the level of safety required before drivers will accept self-driving cars is not clear, the criterion of being safer than a human driver has become pervasive in the discourse on vehicle automation. This criterion actually means "safer than the average human driver," because it is necessarily defined with respect to population-level data. At the level of individual risk assessment, a body of research has shown that most drivers perceive themselves to be safer than the average driver (the better-than-average effect).

Maintenance of memory for melodies: Articulation or attentional refreshing?

Past research on the effects of articulatory suppression on working memory for nonverbal sounds has been characterized by discrepant findings, which suggests that multiple mechanisms may be involved in the rehearsal of nonverbal sounds. In two experiments we examined the potential roles of two theoretical mechanisms of verbal working memory-articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing-in the maintenance of memory for short melodies. In both experiments, participants performed a same-different melody comparison task.

Have We Forgotten Auditory Sensory Memory? Retention Intervals in Studies of Nonverbal Auditory Working Memory.

Researchers have shown increased interest in mechanisms of working memory for nonverbal sounds such as music and environmental sounds. These studies often have used two-stimulus comparison tasks: two sounds separated by a brief retention interval (often 3-5 s) are compared, and a "same" or "different" judgment is recorded. Researchers seem to have assumed that sensory memory has a negligible impact on performance in auditory two-stimulus comparison tasks.

Speech Auditory Alerts Promote Memory for Alerted Events in a Video-Simulated Self-Driving Car Ride.

Objective: Auditory displays could be essential to helping drivers maintain situation awareness in autonomous vehicles, but to date, few or no studies have examined the effectiveness of different types of auditory displays for this application scenario.

Background: Recent advances in the development of autonomous vehicles (i.e.

A comparison of human versus virtual interruptions.

Although a wealth of research has examined the effects of virtual interruptions, human-initiated interruptions are common in many work settings. An experiment compared performance on a primary data-entry task during human-initiated (human) versus computer-initiated (virtual) interruptions. Participants completed blocks of trials that featured either an interruption from a computer or an interruption from a human experimenter.

Mental scanning of sonifications reveals flexible encoding of nonspeech sounds and a universal per-item scanning cost.

A mental scanning paradigm was used to examine the representation of nonspeech sounds in working memory. Participants encoded sonifications - nonspeech auditory representations of quantitative data - as either verbal lists, visuospatial images, or auditory images. The number of tones and overall frequency changes in the sonifications were also manipulated to allow for different hypothesized patterns of reaction times across encoding strategies.

Personal narratives in schizophrenia: increases in coherence following 5 months of vocational rehabilitation.

Many researchers have hoped vocational rehabilitation might help people with schizophrenia not only to work but also to develop more coherent narratives of their abilities and the boundaries imposed by their condition. This study compared narrative accounts of persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (n = 16) generated using the Indiana Psychiatric Illness Interview prior to and 5 months following entry into a vocational rehabilitation program. Results revealed participants with more intact levels of neurocognitive function as assessed with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test demonstrated significant gains in narrative coherence relative to those with greater levels of deficit (F(1,14) = 6.

Vocational function among persons with schizophrenia with and without history of childhood sexual trauma.

This study examined whether history of childhood sexual abuse in schizophrenia is linked with severity of vocational deficits. Work performance was measured using the Work Behavior Inventory and hours of work performed in a vocational rehabilitation program and then compared for 12 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder reporting abuse and 18 with schizophrenia with no abuse history. ANOVAs indicated that the sexual abuse group worked fewer hours during the first 4 weeks of the program and demonstrated poorer work performance overall.

Attributional style and symptoms as predictors of social function in schizophrenia.

While the attributions of people with schizophrenia have been hypothesized to play a role in determining social behavior, contradictory predictions can be made about exactly what type of attributions contribute to social dysfunction. One possibility is that attributing undesirable events to internal, stable, and global factors might lead to poorer social function. An alternate possibility is that attributing events in general to internal, stable, and global factors might lead to better social function.

Hopelessness as a predictor of work functioning among patients with schizophrenia.

Although many persons with schizophrenia report significant levels of hopelessness, less is understood about the impact of hopelessness on functioning. This study examined the relationship between initial ratings of hopelessness and work functioning in the third week of a vocational rehabilitation program for 34 veterans with a diagnosis of a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. Pearson correlations revealed that poorer task performance was associated with perhaps unrealistic expectations of success, whereas poorer interpersonal functioning at work was associated with poorer motivation.

Patterns of obsessive-compulsive symptoms and social function in schizophrenia.

Research has alternately found that obsessive and compulsive (OC) symptoms in schizophrenia are associated with graver and lesser levels of negative symptoms. One possible explanation is that there are two distinct groups of persons with OC symptoms: those with cognitive deficits and high levels of negative symptoms and those who generally function well and have low levels of negative symptoms. To examine this question, we performed a cluster analysis on 66 persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorders on the basis of their level of obsessive-compulsive phenomena and global psychosocial function.

Neuroticism and visual memory impairments as predictors of the severity of delusions in schizophrenia.

This study examined whether levels of emotional distress and impairments in visual memory were uniquely associated with severity of delusions in schizophrenia. Severity of delusions was assessed using select items from the positive component of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale among 44 persons with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder in a post-acute phase of illness. Emotional distress was assessed using the neuroticism subscale of the NEO Five Factor Inventory, and visual memory was assessed using the Rey Complex Figure Test.