The Intention to Conceal Does Not Always Affect Time Perception

The display duration of stimuli is overestimated due to the increase in phasic arousal induced by the stimuli or high levels of background arousal. A previous study demonstrated that display duration of items (2 s) was overestimated when a participant attempted to conceal one of the items so as not to be detected in the concealed information test (CIT). As the time perception remained the same between the item to be concealed and the other items, the overestimation was thought to be due to the high level of background arousal under the conceal condition. Duration of 2 s may be too long to examine the phasic arousal effect induced by the concealed item. The present study conducted three online experiments with shorter durations, that is, each of three items was presented with duration of 1, 0.5, and 2 s in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. The participants were instructed to conceal one of the three items under the conceal condition and did not conceal any item in the innocent condition. The difference in time perception between the conceal and innocent conditions or between items under the conceal condition was observed in none of the three experiments. The result indicates that temporal overestimation does not occur when a participant is only concealing an object. Rather, temporal overestimation would occur only when the level of background arousal is amplified by the concealment.

Conflict of interest disclosure slides at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 in Rome: are they displayed long enough to assess their content? A cross-sectional study

ObjectivesTo assess the duration of display of conflict of interest (COI) disclosure slides of presentations at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2016, and to identify factors associated with the duration of display of the disclosure slide.DesignCross-sectional observational study.Outcome measuresDisplay duration of the COI disclosure slide and display duration per disclosure.ResultsAnalysis of official video recordings of all oral presentations, viewed on the ESC website. 1673 oral presentations were analysed. In 706 presentations (42.2%), COIs were present on the disclosure slide. The median display duration of the disclosure slide was 2.49 s (minimum value: 0.16 s; IQR 1.47–4.08). In multivariable analysis, time spent on COI disclosures was positively related to the number of COIs (+0.11 s per extra COI), older estimated age of the speaker (+3.92 s for 75–85 years compared with <25 years), verbally commenting on disclosures (up to +8.25 s) and disclosures being of a non-commercial nature (+2.83 s). In addition, speakers from Eastern, Southern and Western Europe, Africa+East Asia and Asia showed their disclosures significantly shorter than the reference group (Northern Europe).ConclusionCOI disclosure slides are often displayed too briefly to reasonably assess their content. Several factors appear to influence the duration of display of the COI disclosure slides, but none do so to the degree that the display duration becomes sufficiently long.

Acute fluoxetine differently affects aggressive display in zebrafish phenotypes

Zebrafish have been introduced as a model organism in behavioral neuroscience and biological psychiatry, increasing the breadth of findings using fish to study the neurobiology of aggression. Phenotypic differences between leopard and longfin zebrafish were exploited in order to elucidate the role of phasic serotonin in aggressive displays on this species. The present study revealed differences in aggressive display between leopard and longfin zebrafish, and a discrepant effect of acute fluoxetine in both populations. In mirror-induced aggression, leopard animals showed higher display latencies than longfin, as well as lower display duration and frequency (Experiment 1). Moreover, 2.5 mg/kg fluoxetine decreased the duration and frequency of display in longfin, but not leopard; and 5 mg/kg fluoxetine increased display frequency in leopard, but not longfin (Experiment 2). It is suggested that zebrafish from the longfin phenotype show more aggressive motivation and readiness in the mirror-induced aggression test that leopard, and that acute fluoxetine increases aggression in leopard and decreased it in longfin zebrafish.

Testing the viability of webDMDX for masked priming experiments

The DMDX software package (Forster & Forster, 2003) is a Windows-based application that displays stimuli and records responses. Recent developments in this program have made it possible to deploy DMDX experiments over the Internet. This study evaluates the viability of the web-deployable implementation of DMDX, or webDMDX, for masked priming experiments. A lexical decision task (LDT) with masked repetition priming on high- and low-frequency words and an e/a letter detection task were conducted with both lab-based DMDX (labDMDX; Experiment 1) and webDMDX. The webDMDX experiments were run on lab computers (Experiments 2) and on different (unknown) hardware (Experiment 3). The labDMDX and webDMDX experiments yielded comparable results on the LDT. In the e/a-detection task, the only important difference observed among the tests was between the lab-based experiment (Experiment 1) and the first webDMDX experiment (Experiment 2), at the 50 ms display duration. However, after a minor change in keyword coding (Experiment 2 follow-up) and an adjustment to the millisecond-to-retrace conversion process (Experiment 3), the detection rates at all display durations were similar in both labDMDX and webDMDX. Taken together, these results indicate the utility of webDMDX for masked priming experiments as well as for other time-sensitive methodologies.

Sexual Dimorphisms in Spatial Memory, Facial Recognition, and Reaction Time

Objectives: Literature suggests that there is a female advantage in facial recognition, and a male one in spatial memory. Researchers in this study investigated whether females outperformed males on a Novel Faces and Places (NFAP) test, which uses both facial recognition and spatial memory measures. NFAP was adapted from the Novel Image Novel Location (NINL) test (Piper, Acevedo, Edwards, Curtiss, McGinnis, & Raber, 2011a). Methods: College students (N=95) completed a demographics survey and took NFAP at one of 5 different display duration conditions. Results: No significant differences were found among the sexes for total NFAP score or for novel faces or novel places identification. However, females had faster reaction times overall, and particularly when making correct judgments. Female correct reaction time was significantly faster than female incorrect reaction time and than both male correct and incorrect reaction times. Also observed was a display duration effect, where a 15 second display duration yielded the highest scores compared to 12, 9, 6, or 3 seconds. Conclusion: These findings indicate that males and females process visual information in different ways. Though no significant differences in score were found, the female advantage seen in NINL did in fact disappear on NFAP as was hypothesized.