Effects of an Unexpected and Expected Event on Older Adults' Autonomic Arousal and Eye Fixations During Autonomous Driving.

Driving cessation for some older adults can exacerbate physical, cognitive, and mental health challenges due to loss of independence and social isolation. Fully autonomous vehicles may offer an alternative transport solution, increasing social contact and encouraging independence. However, there are gaps in understanding the impact of older adults' passive role on safe human-vehicle interaction, and on their well-being.

The psychological wellbeing benefits of place engagement during walking in urban environments: A qualitative photo-elicitation study.

The psychological wellbeing potential of walking in urban environments has received limited attention from scholars, despite the important public health implications of identifying characteristics of urban settings that support wellbeing and encourage behaviour change. The study is the first to explore psychological wellbeing experiences of urban walking framed by theories of restorative environments and therapeutic landscape. Self-reported psychological wellbeing experiences of walking in urban settings were investigated with an innovative application of the photo-elicited interview.

Effects of valent image-based secondary tasks on verbal working memory.

Two experiments examined if exposure to emotionally valent image-based secondary tasks introduced at different points of a free recall working memory (WM) task impair memory performance. Images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) varied in the degree of negative or positive valance (mild, moderate, strong) and were positioned at low, moderate and high WM load points with participants rating them based upon perceived valence. As predicted, and based on previous research and theory, the higher the degree of negative (Experiment 1) and positive (Experiment 2) valence and the higher the WM load when a secondary task was introduced, the greater the impairment to recall.

The influence of training and experience on memory strategy.

This paper investigates whether, and if so how much, prior training and experience overwrite the influence of the constraints of the task environment on strategy deployment. This evidence is relevant to the theory of soft constraints that focuses on the role of constraints in the task environment (Gray, Simms, Fu, & Schoelles, Psychological Review, 113: 461-482, 2006). The theory explains how an increase in the cost of accessing information induces a more memory-based strategy involving more encoding and planning.

Improving the effectiveness of an interruption lag by inducing a memory-based strategy.

The memory for goals model (Altmann & Trafton, 2002) posits the importance of a short delay (the 'interruption lag') before an interrupting task to encode suspended goals for retrieval post-interruption. Two experiments used the theory of soft constraints (Gray, Simms, Fu & Schoelles, 2006) to investigate whether the efficacy of an interruption lag could be improved by increasing goal-state access cost to induce a more memory-based encoding strategy. Both experiments used a copying task with three access cost conditions (Low, Medium, and High) and a 5-s interruption lag with a no lag control condition.

Paying the price works: increasing goal-state access cost improves problem solving and mitigates the effect of interruption.

The aim of this paper was to investigate whether it was possible to induce more internal planning in the four-disk Tower of Hanoi (ToH) in order not only to produce more efficient problem solving but also to make it more resistant to the negative effect of interruption. The theoretical frameworks of soft constraints and the memory for goals model underpinned Experiments 1 and 2. In both experiments, three goal-state access cost conditions were used: high (mouse movements and 2.

Improving memory after interruption: exploiting soft constraints and manipulating information access cost.

Forgetting what one was doing prior to interruption is an everyday problem. The recent soft constraints hypothesis (Gray, Sims, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006) emphasizes the strategic adaptation of information processing strategy to the task environment. It predicts that increasing information access cost (IAC: the time, and physical and mental effort involved in accessing information) encourages a more memory-intensive strategy.