Towards an ecologically valid naturalistic cognitive neuroscience of memory and event cognition.

The landscape of human memory and event cognition research has witnessed a transformative journey toward the use of naturalistic contexts and tasks. In this review, we track this progression from abrupt, artificial stimuli used in extensively controlled laboratory experiments to more naturalistic tasks and stimuli that present a more faithful representation of the real world. We argue that in order to improve ecological validity, naturalistic study designs must consider the complexity of the cognitive phenomenon being studied.

Health care workers and ICU pain perceptions.

Objective: Our study examined the effect of health care workers' personal characteristics on how they perceive and intend to treat patients' pain in the intensive care unit. Though pain perceptions have been well established from the patient's perspective, less is known about how variations in health care workers may affect their perceptions of pain.

Design: This study consisted of a 28-item questionnaire distributed to 122 medical staff personnel over a 12-month period.