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PubMed1999

[The cost effectiveness of echography biopsy].

Ecopsy is a postmortem technique which, by means of echography-guided puncture and/or aspiration obtains material for histological analysis. This study compared cost and time employed in 100 ecopsies and 100 classic necropsies and confirmed that cost of materials in ecopsy is 65% lower than that in necropsy. Physicians, necropsy technicians, laboratory technicians and secretary team personnel spent 33%, 54%, 19% and 32% less time than in necropsy. The clinical report of ecopsy was finished within nine days even with the brain study included.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

The ophthalmologist's office: planning and practice. Staffing.

By seeking top-flight office personnel and then offering attractive salaries and fringe benefits, systematically and selectively screening available applicants, and properly training and indoctrinating them in office policies, task analysis, and performance, the young ophthalmologist will assemble the most useful and compatible office staff, thereby making his or her professional life most productive and pleasant.

Allied Health Personnel↗
PubMed1992

[The content of the nursing consultation at a health center].

AIMS: To describe the care process in the Nursing Station. To analyse the length of a consultation and factors which affect the length. DESIGN: Crossover study. Analysis of the length of the Consultation, using a multiple lineal regression model. SITE. Urban Health Centre. PATIENTS AND OTHERS TAKING PART: All the calls and consultations, both in the patient's home and in the Health Centre, undertaken by six nurses over a period of two weeks. MAIN MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS: There were 879 consultations. 65.41% of them took place in the treatment room. Ten health problems represented 72% of the work-load. Health education took un the greatest proportion of time. The average time of a consultation was of 10.40 +/- 0.3 minutes. The length of the consultation depended on the professional involved, on the place where it took place, on the number of problems which the patient had and on the nature of the main problem: multiple correlation coefficient = 0.74; F = 67.52 (p < 0.00000001). CONCLUSIONS: The nurse faces a very limited number of health problems. Most of her activities are preventive or to do with prevention. The length of the Consultation in greatly conditioned by the amount of morbidity.

Community Health Centers↗
PubMed1991

Laterality and motor control.

Lateralization in motor control, exemplified by handedness, is a publically observable lateral asymmetry. The understanding of causation of lateral asymmetry in movement is poor for two major reasons. First, structural limitations underlying lateral bias cannot be compelling in the sense that laterality is completely specified. Second, interacting sources of lateral bias are probably represented at several levels of the central nervous system, with some sources being many steps removed from the executing motor structures. Both factors permit flexibility in terms of which side does what. I suggest two approaches to improve understanding of mechanism. First, use of bimanual tasks which reduce flexibility in lateral expression and therefore provide more information than unimanual tasks. Second, analysis of task performances in terms of what levels of lateral specialization are likely to be involved. Such analyses will be especially useful in the understanding of hand use in left-handers who perform different skilled tasks with different hands.

Female↗
PubMed1993

Private speech of learning disabled and normally achieving children in classroom academic and laboratory contexts.

Learning disabled (LD) children are often targets for cognitive-behavioral interventions designed to train them in effective use of a self-directed speech. The purpose of this study was to determine if, indeed, these children display immature private speech in the naturalistic classroom setting. Comparisons were made of the private speech, motor accompaniment to task, and attention of LD and normally achieving classmates during academic seatwork. Setting effects were examined by comparing classroom data with observations during academic seatwork and puzzle solving in the laboratory. Finally, a subgroup of LD children symptomatic of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was compared with pure LD and normally achieving controls to determine if the presumed immature private speech is a function of a learning disability or externalizing behavior problems. Results indicated that LD children used more task-relevant private speech than controls, an effect that was especially pronounced for the LD/ADHD subgroup. Use of private speech was setting- and task-specific. Implications for intervention and future research methodology are discussed.

Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity↗
PubMed1997

Saccade amplitude as a discriminator of flight types.

PURPOSE: Effectiveness of saccade amplitudes and dwell time lengths in determining pilots' eye scanning behaviors, and thus visual workload, during instrument- and scenery-centered simulator flight tasks was investigated. METHOD: Five male jet-aircraft pilots volunteered, and five different simulated flight tasks, including takeoff to landing, were selected for the study. RESULTS: An aerobatic flight, considered to be a scenery-centered one, showed the largest saccadic amplitude among the five flight tasks, its mean value three times that of S-shaped circular flight (SLW), considered to be instrument-centered. The shortest dwell time was for landing, its dwell time length half those of the other flights, and the longest was for SLW. The post-hoc test result revealed that this measure is only partially successful in differentiating landing from the other types of flights. The regression coefficient of the aerobatic flight was about three times that of SLW, and takeoff was almost two times SLW. CONCLUSION: Saccade amplitude was the most important factor in distinguishing between the two types of flights. Dwell time length was supportive, and shift rate of the line of slight was inconclusive in differentiating flight tasks. A scattergram drawn with amplitudes and dwell times gives us a clear understanding of the difference between the two types of flights.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

Job analysis in the clinical laboratory.

Questionnaires were sent to 111 hospitals located within a 100-mile radius of Morgantown, West Virginia. In the 55 responding hospitals, 1,532 laboratory workers were employed; of this total, 399 were MT(ASCP), 55 were MLT(ASCP), 262 were CLA(ASCP), and 816 were not certified by the Board of Registry of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists (ASCP). Participating hospital laboratory directors were asked to distribute task inventories to medical technologists and to individuals not certified as MT(ASCP). One hundred sixty-five task inventories were completed and returned for analysis. Using the chi square test, comparison was made between the tasks performed by ASCP-certified medical technologists and ASCP-certified laboratory assistants. Both performed essentially the same tasks in the clinical laboratories included in this study. In the final analysis, teaching and supervision were performed more frequently by MTs than by CLAs.

Certification↗
PubMed2000

Pseudoneglect: a review and meta-analysis of performance factors in line bisection tasks.

An exhaustive qualitative (vote-counting) review is conducted of the literature concerning visual and non-visual line bisection in neurologically normal subject populations. Although most of these studies report a leftward bisection error (i.e., pseudoneglect), considerable between-study variability and inconsistency characterize this literature. A meta-analysis of this same literature is performed in which the total quantitative data set, comprising 73 studies (or sub-studies) and 2191 subjects, is analyzed with respect to 26 performance factors. The meta-analytic results indicate a significant leftward bisection error in neurologically normal subjects, with an overall effect size of between -0.37 and -0.44 (depending on integration method), which is significantly modulated to varying degrees by a number of additional task or subject variables. For example, visual bisection tasks, midsagittal-pointing tasks and tactile bisection tasks all lead to leftward errors, while kinesthetic tasks result in rightward errors. Tachistoscopic forced-choice testing methods reveal much greater estimates of bisection error (effect size = -1.32) than do manual method-of-adjustment procedures (effect size= -0.40). Subject age significantly modulates line bisection performance such that older subjects err significantly rightward compared to younger subjects, and to veridical line midpoint. Male subjects make slightly larger leftward errors than do female subjects. Handedness has a small effect on bisection errors, with dextrals erring slightly further to the left than sinistral subjects. The hand used to perform manual bisection tasks modulated performance, where use of the left hand lead to greater leftward errors than those obtained using the right hand. One of the most significant factors modulating bisection error is the direction in which subjects initiate motor scanning (with either eye or hand), where a left-to-right scan pattern leads to large leftward errors while a right-to-left scan pattern leads to rightward errors.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Processing goals, task interest, and the mood-performance relationship: a mediational analysis.

The authors examined the role of intrinsic interest in mediating the relationship among mood, processing goals, and task performance. Participants in induced happy, neutral, or sad moods generated similarities and differences between TV shows using performance-based, enjoyment-based, or no stop rule (cf. L.L. Martin, D.W. Ward, J.W. Achee, & R.S. Wyer, 1993). Pretask interest and both quantitative (time spent, number generated) and qualitative (creativity) performance were assessed. Happy participants spent more time and generated more items than other participants when using an enjoyment-based stop rule but spent less time and generated fewer items when using a performance-based stop rule. Happy participants also expressed greater pretask interest and were more creative than other participants regardless of stop rule. Regression-based path analyses indicated that pretask interest partially mediated the effects of mood on quantitative performance but not on creativity.

Affect↗
PubMed1998

Effects of task goal on movement kinematics and line bisection performance in adults without disabilities.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated (a) whether the kinematic profile of a reaching-for-an-object movement would differ depending on the goal of the reaching task and (b) the effect of task goal on attentional carryover. METHOD: Twenty-four adults without disabilities performed a horizontal line bisection task under three conditions: (a) a natural condition (pressing the ringing lever of a desk bell), (b) an impoverished condition (touching the ringing lever of a desk bell), and (c) a control condition (bisecting a line only). Only the natural and impoverished conditions used the reaching task (i.e., pressing or touching the ringing lever of the desk bell). The kinematic profile of reaching for the bell was established with the OPTO-TRAK system, a quantitative kinematic analysis measure. The line bisection task was performed immediately after the reaching task, which was located adjacent to the left of the line to be bisected. RESULTS: The natural condition elicited better quality of reaching movement than did the impoverished condition. It produced significantly shorter movement time and higher peak velocity. A less impressive effect was found for percentage of reach where peak velocity occurs. Bisection performance under the two experimental conditions was leftward biased relative to the control condition, and the magnitude of leftward bias in the natural condition was greater than that for the impoverished condition. CONCLUSION: Results supported one core assumption of occupational therapy: goal-directed and functional tasks can be used to enhance human performance. If the results hold for clinical populations, manipulations of functional goals may enhance movement performance of persons with disabilities and remediate left neglect often seen in clients who have had a stroke.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

An analysis of the relationship between cardiac deceleration and correct performance under conditions of constant task difficulty.

Previous analyses of the relationship between cardiac deceleration and correct performance suffered from a confounding of task difficulty with performance accuracy. The present analysis indicates that the relationship between these variables still holds and is, in fact, more general under conditions which control difficulty of the task at a constant level.

Achievement↗
PubMed2000

Benefits of interhemispheric integration on the Japanese Kana script-matching tasks.

We tested Banich's hypothesis that the benefits of bihemispheric processing were enhanced as task complexity increased, when some procedural shortcomings in the previous studies were overcome by using Japanese Kana script-matching tasks. In Exp. 1, the 20 right-handed subjects were given the Physical-Identity task (Katakana-Katakana scripts matching) and the Name-Identity task (Katakana-Hiragana scripts matching). On both tasks, a pair of Kana scripts was tachistoscopically presented in the left, right, and bilateral visual fields. Distractor stimuli were also presented with target Kana scripts on both tasks to equate the processing load between the hemispheres. Analysis showed that, while a bilateral visual-field advantage was found on the name-identity task, a unilateral visual-field advantage was found on the physical-identity task, suggesting that, as the computational complexity of the encoding stage was enhanced, the benefits of bilateral hemispheric processing increased. In Exp. 2, the 16 right-handed subjects were given the same physical-identity task as in Exp. 1, except Hiragana scripts were used as distractors instead of digits to enhance task difficulty. Analysis showed no differences in performance between the unilateral and bilateral visual fields. Taking into account these results of physical-identity tasks for both Exps. 1 and 2, enhancing task demand in the stage of ignoring distractors made the unilateral visual-field advantage obtained in Exp. 1 disappear in Exp. 2. These results supported Banich's hypothesis.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Serial-position effects in paragraph recall following mild closed-head injury.

Serial-position effects were examined on a contextual memory task (paragraph recall) for patients with minor to mild closed-head injury and normal controls. Analysis indicated that at immediate recall, both normals and closed-head-injury patients have primacy and recency effects. With regard to total recall, however, the closed-head-injury patients remembered significantly fewer items than normal controls. The poorer performance of the minor to mild closed-head-injury group was not related to the duration from injury to neuropsychological evaluation and appears to be a lasting feature of memory performance following such injury. The pattern of serial-position effects was different between the groups. Normal controls showed slight recency and primacy effects and relatively better recall for the middle portions of the story, while patients with minor to mild closed-head injuries have prominent recency and primacy effects. Potential explanations for this pattern of performance are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Accordance between EEG alpha power and dual task performance for different visual cognitive tasks.

Evidence from clinical and experimental studies suggests that the left hemisphere is preferentially engaged in language processing and mathematical-analytic tasks while the right is involved with spatial relations and synthetic tasks. The purpose of the present study was to investigate accordance between dual task paradigm (effects of concurrent cognitive tasks on right- and left-hand finger tapping frequency) and EEG alpha power changes, which are used to conduct research in lateralization of cognitive function. Subjects performed reading, face recognition and line orientation tasks. First, the EEG was recorded during the tasks and, after six months, the dual task was carried out using the same cognitive tasks. Statistical analysis yielded no significant main effect for the hemispheres, performing hand and three cognitive tasks separately for the dual task and the EEG alpha power changes. However, significant correlation between the two methods was found, indicating the left parietal activation for the reading task, the right temporal activation for the line orientation task, and both hemispheric activation for the face recognition task. Results first suggest a significant accordance between dual task performance and EEG alpha asymmetry studies.

Adolescent↗