Publications by authors named "Sidney D'Mello"

Neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have provided unparalleled insights into the fundamental neural mechanisms underlying human cognitive processing, such as high-level linguistic processes during reading. Here, we build upon this prior work to capture sentence reading comprehension outside the MRI scanner using functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS) in a large sample of participants (n = 82). We observed increased task-related hemodynamic responses in prefrontal and temporal cortical regions during sentence-level reading relative to the control condition (a list of non-words), replicating prior fMRI work on cortical recruitment associated with high-level linguistic processing during reading comprehension.

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Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low-level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high-level convergence.

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Personal qualities like prosocial purpose and leadership predict important life outcomes, including college success. Unfortunately, the holistic assessment of personal qualities in college admissions is opaque and resource intensive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) advance the goals of holistic admissions? While cost-effective, AI has been criticized as a "black box" that may inadvertently penalize already disadvantaged subgroups when used in high-stakes settings.

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Reading is one of the most common everyday activities, yet research elucidating how affective influence reading processes and outcomes is sparse with inconsistent results. To investigate this question, we randomly assigned participants (= 136) to happiness (positive affect), sadness (negative affect), and neutral video-induction conditions prior to engaging in self-paced reading of a long, complex science text. Participants completed assessments targeting multiple levels of comprehension (e.

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Background: To increase uptake of implementation science (IS) methods by researchers and implementers, many have called for ways to make it more accessible and intuitive. The purpose of this paper is to describe the iPRISM webtool (Iterative, Practical, Robust Implementation and Sustainability Model) and how this interactive tool operationalizes PRISM to assess and guide a program's (a) alignment with context, (b) progress on pragmatic outcomes, (c) potential adaptations, and (d) future sustainability across the stages of the implementation lifecycle.

Methods: We used an iterative human-centered design process to develop the iPRISM webtool.

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There is growing policy interest in identifying contexts that cultivate self-regulation. Doing so often entails comparing groups of individuals (e.g.

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Background: Stress can have adverse effects on health and well-being. Informed by laboratory findings that heart rate variability (HRV) decreases in response to an induced stress response, recent efforts to monitor perceived stress in the wild have focused on HRV measured using wearable devices. However, it is not clear that the well-established association between perceived stress and HRV replicates in naturalistic settings without explicit stress inductions and research-grade sensors.

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Background: Studies that use ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) or wearable sensors to track numerous attributes, such as physical activity, sleep, and heart rate, can benefit from reductions in missing data. Maximizing compliance is one method of reducing missing data to increase the return on the heavy investment of time and money into large-scale studies.

Objective: This paper aims to identify the extent to which compliance can be prospectively predicted from individual attributes and initial compliance.

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Negative life events, such as the death of a loved one, are an unavoidable part of life. These events can be overwhelmingly stressful and may lead to the development of mental health disorders. To mitigate these adverse developments, prior literature has utilized measures of psychological responses to negative life events to better understand their effects on mental health.

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Emotional regularity is the degree to which a person maintains and returns to a set of emotional states over time. The present investigation examined associations between emotional regularity and extant emotion measures as well as psychologically relevant dimensions of personality, health, and real-world occupational outcomes. Participants included 598 U.

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Article Synopsis
  • Research has explored the relationship between eye movements during reading and understanding the text, focusing on whether this connection is weak or strong over time.
  • A predictive modeling approach was used on data from three studies involving different groups of participants reading long texts, revealing a strong correlation between eye movement patterns and comprehension scores even after a delay.
  • The findings indicate that shorter, more frequent fixations while reading are associated with better comprehension, supporting the idea that eye movements are significantly linked to how well we understand written material.
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During mind wandering, visual processing of external information is attenuated. Accordingly, mind wandering is associated with changes in gaze behaviors, albeit findings are inconsistent in the literature. This heterogeneity obfuscates a complete view of the moment-to-moment processing priorities of the visual system during mind wandering.

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Personality traits such as grit and self-control are important determinants of success in life outcomes. However, most measures of these traits, which rely on self-reports, might be biased when used for the purpose of evaluating education policies or interventions. Recent research has shown the potential of survey effort-in particular, item non-response and careless answering-as a proxy measure of these traits.

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This study answered novel questions about the connection between high school extracurricular dosage (number of activities and participation duration) and the attainment of a bachelor's degree. Using data from the Common Application and the National Student Clearinghouse (N = 311,308), we found that greater extracurricular participation positively predicted bachelor's degree attainment. However, among students who ultimately earned a bachelor's degree, participating in more than a moderate number of high school activities (3 or 4) predicted decreasing odds of earning a bachelor's degree on time (within 4 years).

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We hypothesize that effective collaboration is facilitated when individuals and environmental components form a synergy where they work together and regulate one another to produce stable patterns of behavior, or regularity, as well as adaptively reorganize to form new behaviors, or irregularity. We tested this hypothesis in a study with 32 triads who collaboratively solved a challenging visual computer programming task for 20 min following an introductory warm-up phase. Multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis was used to examine fine-grained (i.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores the concept of frustration tolerance and its relationship with achieving goals, utilizing a new behavioral measure called the Mirror Tracing Frustration Task (MTFT).
  • Two studies involving young adults confirmed that the MTFT effectively induces frustration and correlates with self-reported frustration tolerance.
  • A larger study with high-school seniors found that higher MTFT scores predicted better academic performance and progress toward a college degree, emphasizing the significance of frustration tolerance alongside other factors like IQ and self-control.
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What do we think about when we mind wander and where do these thoughts come from? We tested the idea that semantically rich stimuli yield patterns of mind wandering that are closely coupled with the stimuli compared to being more internally triggered. We analyzed the content of 949 self-reported zone outs (1218 thoughts) and 519 of their triggers from 88 participants who read an instructional text and watched a film for 20 min each. We found that mind wandering associated with memory retrieval was more frequent than prospection and introspection across both stimuli.

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Material re-exposure (e.g., re-reading) is a popular mnemonic strategy, however, its utility has been questioned.

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Physiological limitations on the visual system require gaze to move from location to location to extract the most relevant information within a scene. Therefore, gaze provides a real-time index of the information-processing priorities of the visual system. We investigated gaze allocation during mind wandering (MW), a state where cognitive priorities shift from processing task-relevant external stimuli (i.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study explored how the changes in a film's narrative structure affect viewers' attention, particularly focusing on mind wandering during a film called The Red Balloon.
  • - Researchers tracked instances of mind wandering from 108 participants and found that more frequent situational changes in the film correlated with fewer instances of mind wandering.
  • - Specifically, when participants perceived event boundaries or changes in the film, they were less likely to lose focus, indicating that dynamic storytelling helps maintain attention.
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It is generally acknowledged that engagement plays a critical role in learning. Unfortunately, the study of engagement has been stymied by a lack of valid and efficient measures. We introduce the advanced, analytic, and automated (AAA) approach to measure engagement at fine-grained temporal resolutions.

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Objective: Can having too much self-control make people unhappy? Researchers have increasingly questioned the unilateral goodness of self-control and proposed that it is beneficial only up to a certain point, after which it becomes detrimental. The little empirical research on the issue shows mixed results. Hence, we tested whether a curvilinear relationship between self-control and subjective well-being exists.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how engaged readers adjust their reading times based on the difficulty of text, hypothesizing that this adjustment is crucial for comprehension.
  • Researchers tested this by analyzing data from 484 participants who read various texts and reported their mind wandering, revealing a connection between reading times, text complexity, and comprehension.
  • Findings suggest that when readers effectively adapt their reading pace to text difficulty, it reduces mind wandering and enhances understanding, indicating that attention needs to align with the text for better comprehension.
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Mind wandering is a ubiquitous phenomenon in which attention shifts from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in mind wandering, but research has been stymied by a lack of objective measures, leading to a near-exclusive reliance on self-reports. We addressed this issue by developing an eye-gaze-based, machine-learned model of mind wandering during computerized reading.

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Article Synopsis
  • *Previous research has shown that difficult texts increase MW because they hinder constructing mental models, but this study explores if MW can be reduced without changing the text itself.
  • *By using disfluent typefaces, the study found that participants experienced less MW without affecting comprehension, indicating that increased processing difficulty can enhance attention and thus improve reading performance.*
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