Biomedical subjects

John A King

Publications and source records attributed to John A King.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Doing the right thing: a common neural circuit for appropriate violent or compassionate behavior.

Humans have a considerable facility to adapt their behavior in a manner that is appropriate to social or societal context. A failure of this ability can lead to social exclusion and is a feature of disorders such as psychopathy and disruptive behavior disorder. We investigated the neural basis of this ability using a customized video game played by 12 healthy participants in an fMRI scanner. Two conditions involved extreme examples of context-appropriate action: shooting an aggressive humanoid assailant or healing a passive wounded person. Two control conditions involved carefully matched stimuli paired with inappropriate actions: shooting the person or healing the assailant. Surprisingly, the same circuit, including the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, was activated when participants acted in a context-appropriate manner, whether being compassionate towards an injured conspecific or aggressive towards a violent assailant. The findings indicate a common system that guides behavioral expression appropriate to social or societal context irrespective of its aggressive or compassionate nature.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

The hippocampal role in spatial memory and the familiarity--recollection distinction: a case study.

Memory for object locations and for events (comprising the receipt of an object) was tested in a case of developmental amnesia with focal hippocampal damage. Tests used virtual reality environments and forced-choice recognition with foils chosen to equalize the performance of control participants across conditions. Memory for the objects received was unimpaired, but the context of their receipt was forgotten. Memory for short lists of object locations was unimpaired when tested from the same viewpoint as presentation but impaired when tested from a shifted viewpoint. Same-view performance was disrupted by changing the background scene. These results are consistent with Jon having preserved matching to fixed sensory-bound representations but impaired reconstructed or manipulable representations underlying shifted-viewpoint recognition and episodic recollection.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Measuring client satisfaction with public education I: meeting competing demands in establishing state-wide benchmarks.

By its very nature, a large-scale evaluation of client satisfaction with public education using a quantitative approach, places almost impossibly competing demands on the research methodology. This paper reports on the use of a suite of Rasch measurement techniques to meet the competing demands in establishing state-wide benchmarks relating to the School Opinion Survey carried out over 1200 government schools in one state of Australia. Although the evaluation had to establish system-wide representative parent and student benchmarks, meaningful quantitative estimates of client satisfaction had to be provided at the smallest public schools. The final 20-item School Opinion Survey Parent and Student Forms were designed following feedback from the administration of trial forms. Instrument development was monitored by the results of Rasch modeling. The Rasch modeling property of specific objectivity was empirically verified when calculation of identical benchmark estimates resulted from the construction of simulated population proportional samples using sample:population size weightings.

Attitude↗

PubMed2003

Measuring client satisfaction with public education II: comparing schools with state benchmarks.

Because the results of the client satisfaction evaluation trials conducted in the state's public schools revealed that levels of client satisfaction differed in significant and meaningful ways between parents and students as well as between types of schools, this research consultancy provided school versus benchmark comparison reports based on groups of generally comparable school types. The state benchmark for each set of comparable schools estimated how easy it was, on average, for the members of the benchmark group (parents or students) to endorse each of the 20 School Opinion Survey Likert-scale items (King and Bond, 2003). The school satisfaction level for each item was calculated by a similar process to estimate how easy it was, on average, for the members of the school sample (parents or students) to endorse that item. Reports to individual schools used easy to interpret Parent/Student Satisfaction Graphs which plotted the Rasch-modeled differences between the state benchmark level and the school level for each item. In very small schools where the small amount of data did not allow for item-by-item graphs to be constructed, overall satisfaction graphs provided one global comparison with the appropriate benchmark to be reported.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Measuring client satisfaction with public education III: group effects in client satisfaction.

A contracted research project to evaluate client satisfaction with public education (King and Bond, 2003; Bond and King, 2003) required that the satisfaction of certain groups of clients received particular attention. A number of target groups were specifically identified by the state education department as those requiring separate satisfaction analyses. ConQuest software (Wu, Adams and Wilson, 1997) provided convenient techniques for estimating group mean effects for identified sub-groups of the parent and student samples. This allowed for the analysis of directly comparable satisfaction estimates for groups such as these, as well as for school size, school type, school location and parents according to the year level of the child's school class. Rasch analyses of group mean effects revealed generally, that for students, differences in overall satisfaction levels between identified sub-samples and the whole student sample even if statistically significant, were, at most, substantively marginal. However, for identified groups of parents and caregivers, the results were not so equivocal: one group of indigenous Australians, and parents of children with disabilities showed marked positive group mean effects, while another group of indigenous Australians reported lower satisfaction levels than did the whole parent sample. Moreover, analyses based on groupings of schools according to their relative complexity, appeared to reiterate the finding mentioned en passant in a previous paper (King and Bond, 2003), that client satisfaction decreased as school size increased.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2002

Human hippocampus and viewpoint dependence in spatial memory.

Virtual reality was used to sequentially present objects within a town square and to test recognition of object locations from the same viewpoint as presentation, or from a shifted viewpoint. A developmental amnesic case with focal bilateral hippocampal pathology showed a massive additional impairment when tested from the shifted viewpoint compared with a mild, list length-dependent, impairment when tested from the same viewpoint. While the same-view condition could be solved by visual pattern matching, the shifted-view condition requires a viewpoint independent representation or an equivalent mechanism for translating or rotating viewpoints in memory. The latter mechanism was indicated by control subjects' response latencies in the shifted-view condition, although the amnesic case is not impaired in tests of mental rotation of single objects. These results show that the human hippocampus supports viewpoint independence in spatial memory, and suggest that it does so by providing a mechanism for viewpoint manipulation in memory. In addition, they suggest an extremely sensitive test for human hippocampal damage, and hint at the nature of the hippocampal role in episodic recollection.

Adult↗