Search results

Current Army doctrine stresses a need for military leaders to have the capability to make flexible and adaptive decisions based on a future unknown environment, location and enemy. To assess a military decision maker’s ability in this context, this paper aims to modify the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test which assesses cognitive flexibility, into a military relevant map task. Thirty-four military officers from all service branches completed the map task.

The purpose of this study was to modify a current psychological task that measures cognitive flexibility into a military relevant task that includes the challenge of overcoming experiential bias, and understand underlying causes of individual variability in the decision-making and cognitive flexibility behavior of active duty military officers on this task.

Results indicated that non-perseverative errors were a strong predictor of cognitive flexibility performance on the map task. Decomposition of non-perseverative error into efficient errors and random errors revealed that participants who did not complete the map task changed their sorting strategy too soon within a series, resulting in a high quantity of random errors.

This study serves as the first step in customizing cognitive psychological tests for a military purpose and understanding why some military participants show poor cognitive flexibility.

This paper aims to investigate the decision-making on new ventures of eight directors or managers of Brazilian accelerators, aiming to understand if the Einstellung effect – mental rigidity – operates during the judgment of new ventures to accelerate.

Through a quasi-experiment design, the study was conducted with directors or managers of Brazilian accelerators, who were separately interviewed and responded to a psychological test, previously consented, as well as to a simulated decision-making questionnaire.

The selection process, with the criteria for decision-making, functions as a “template” for the recognition of potentially successful companies and is, indeed, subject to various cognitive biases, among which, the Einstellung effect, characteristic of mental rigidity.

The main contribution of the present study is to identify the cognitive mechanisms, which can negatively affect the evaluation of innovative projects and propose ways that can counteract or mitigate them.

The psychological approach to decision-making, usually studied in chess game context or problem-solving, was applied to a relatively unexplored field that is startups to accelerate. Its originality remains at the interdisciplinary approach, combining knowledge from psychology, decision-making and entrepreneurship.

For many years it has been speculated that some learning and attention problems in children are related to underlying problems in neurological functioning. In fact, the IDEA (1997) definition of learning disabilities utilizes terminology that specifically includes neurological processes and conditions: Specific learning disabilities means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations. The term includes such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The term does not include children who have learning problems which are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor handicaps, of mental retardation, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.This chapter begins with a review of the role of neuroimaging in advancing an understanding of the basis and nature of learning and attention problems. The ever-increasing sophistication of neurodiagnostic technology has made it possible to obtain more precise information about neuroanatomical and neurophysiological bases of behavior, including learning and attention. Advances in technology have greatly increased the ability to study the functioning of the brain during the performance of relatively complex mental activities. With this advanced technology it is becoming increasingly possible to visualize normal and abnormal brain functioning, including important components of basic academic skills. The chapter includes a discussion of the recent evidence about the neurological basis of learning and attention problems.

Assessment of executive functioning is an important element of a comprehensive assessment of intellectual abilities. Few assessments available are accessible for individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) and none have population-specific norms. This paper aims to describe the adaptation of the behavioural assessment of dysexecutive syndrome (BADS).

Adaptations were made to the BADS tests to create the BADS – intellectual disabilities (BADS-ID). Data from three doctoral dissertations were combined to explore the utility, reliability, validity and component structure of the BADS-ID. Properties of the BADS-ID were compared with the Cambridge Executive Functioning Assessment (CEFA).

The BADS-ID is accessible to IQ range 50–70 and has a two-component structure. It has good inter-rater reliability, but poor internal consistency. It has a good face and content validity but evidence for concurrent and discriminative validity is weak. All properties are comparable to or better than the CEFA.

Further research is needed to improve reliability and validity. The development of an accessible test battery with known reliability and validity for individuals with ID should facilitate research into executive functioning in this population. There is the potential to develop population-specific norms from the data.

An accessible test battery for individuals with ID is helpful in clinical situations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the adaptation of the BADS for use with individuals with ID.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the nature of the academic skills deficits in male offenders and their relation to neurocognitive deficits.

In total, 72 Finnish male prisoners were tested with regard to reading, spelling, and mathematical abilities.

Low academic skills, especially reading, were related to poor neurocognitive performance in verbal memory, visual memory, attention, and motor dexterity. The results showed a high number (29-36 percent) of reading and spelling disorders. In all, 15 percent of those with medium to severe problems in academic skills had marked difficulties in mathematics. In total, 88 percent of the participants with at least one problem area in literacy skills had neurocognitive deficits. In the present study, the pervasive neurocognitive deficits, occurring comorbidly with reading and spelling difficulties, seem to refer to a fundamental set of deficits which are only minimally explained by IQ, educational background or training.

Reading and spelling difficulties could be seen as functional illiteracy which, combined with a broad spectrum of neuropsychological function deficits, pose a challenging task for rehabilitation. Only after proper identification of deficits has been achieved is it possible to set goals and select the appropriate means for rehabilitation. One obvious limitation is the moderate number of subjects (n=72).

It may not be enough just to train reading or develop literacy activities among prisoners; focussing intervention on comprehensive neurocognitive deficits is also necessary.

Correlates and comorbidity between academic difficulties and neurocognitive deficits among offenders, especially in arithmetic difficulties, have been less studied.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition with community prevalence globally of 2%–7% (M = 5%; Sayal et al., 2018). Clinicians are routinely encouraged to explain to children and young people the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, including exercise (NICE NG87, 2018). Exercise has been proposed as a safe and low-cost adjunctive approach for ADHD and is reported to be accompanied by positive effects on several aspects of executive functioning (EF). The purpose of this narrative review was to synthesise the contemporary randomised control trial (RCT) studies that examine the effect of sport, physical activity and movement on EF in children and adolescents with ADHD.

A narrative review approach with a systematic literature search using PRISMA guidelines for screening and selecting relevant systematic reviews was used. The final review included four peer-review systematic reviews (>2019).

The results identified four RCT meta-analyses and findings showed that children and adolescents with lower baseline cognitive performance demonstrated greater improvements in functioning after physical activity interventions, particularly for tasks with higher executive function demands, where baseline performance reaches an optimal level. Findings suggest that 10–20 min of acute moderate-high-intensity exercise interventions (cycling/running) appeared to have positive effects on indices of inhibitory control. Preliminary evidence suggests that as little as 5 min of jumping exercises improved inhibitory control. Sixty to eighty minutes of moderately intense, repeated (chronic) exercise appeared to demonstrate the greatest beneficial impact on selective attention.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review is the first to present the extant literature on the effect of physical activity and sport on symptoms of young people with ADHD. It presents evidence to suggest that exercise with progressively increasing cognitive demands may have positive effects for children with ADHD, specifically in terms of improving cognitive flexibility. Further large-scale clinical trials are needed to confirm the positive effects of physical exercise on cognitive functioning in children with ADHD.

This chapter introduces electroencephalography (EEG), a measure of neurophysiological activity, as a critical method for investigating individual and team decision-making and cognition. EEG is a useful tool for expanding the theoretical and research horizons in organizational cognitive neuroscience, with a lower financial cost and higher portability than other neuroimaging methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging). This chapter briefly reviews past work that has applied cognitive neuroscience methods to investigate cognitive processes and outcomes. The focus is on describing contemporary EEG measures that reflect individual cognition and compare them to complementary measures in the field of psychology and management. The authors discuss how neurobiological measures of cognition relate to and may predict both individual cognitive performance and team cognitive performance (decision-making). This chapter aims to assist scholars in the field of managerial and organizational cognition in understanding the complementarity between psychological and neurophysiological methods, and how they may be combined to develop new hypotheses in the intersection of these research fields.

Subjective measurements of cognition have seldom been used in schizophrenia. This is mainly due to the assumption that such measurements lack sensitivity in a disorder characterized by poor insight. We investigated the capacity of BRIEF-A (Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function - Adult Version: a self-administered, ecological questionnaire) to identify executive deficits in adults with schizophrenia. The global score and each domain-specific score was significantly lower in patients than in healthy controls. BRIEF-A could be a useful complement to objective measurements, providing a subjective assessment of everyday consequences of executive dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia.

A recent report by Patrick G. Skelly of the ACM Standards Committee outlines some of the reasons why the ACM has asked that the Programming Language Ada specification is not given American National Standard (ANSI) status at this time. The full text of the ACM position on Standardization of Ada, together with the re‐sponses from the U.S. Department of Defence Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO) is given in Communications of the ACM, 25, 2 (1982).