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PubMed1998

[Dependence of learning characteristics on visual object properties in Rhesus macaca by bilateral removal of the 7th field of the parietal cortex].

Removal of the rhesus monkey parietal cortex 7th field exerted no effect on learning processes involving visual discrimination of images united in their colour and geometrical form, but the learning of differentiating the spatial information did suffer. The data obtained suggests that, in the process of learning visual differentiation, spatial differentiating signs are formed, the process involving neuronal structures of the 7th field of the inferior cortex. Removal of the 7th field disrupts mechanisms of the body scheme assession and egocentric orientation resulting from visual-vestibular interrelationships.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Information access at the point of care: what can we learn for designing a mobile CPR system?

OBJECTIVES: Hospitals have started to migrate their paper-based records to computerized patient records (CPR). The majority of today's CPR systems are stationary, which means that physicians use a clinical workstation to access CPR information. But health care professionals need to request and enter information at different locations, for example, on their daily ward round. This suggests the use of mobile computers, enabling an ubiquitous access to needed data. Different studies show that health care professionals are reluctant to use poorly designed mobile CPR systems, as the work at the point of care is very time-pressured and hectic. To design a system with high acceptance, it is essential to obtain empirical insight into the work practices and context in which the mobile CPR system will be used. METHOD: We investigated the physicians' work with the patient record during their daily round. With the help of a compact notation method, the physicians' interaction with the information system was recorded in real time. Fourteen physicians from three different departments (internal medicine, surgery, and geriatrics) of a middle-sized Swiss hospital participated in our study. RESULTS: Physicians have clear access preferences when they interact with the patient record during their daily round. There exists a clear profile of access frequencies and patterns, respectively. As an example, approximately 50% of all patient record accesses concern information about medications, vital signs and lab test results. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: A CPR system which is designed to reflect the access frequencies and patterns should improve the efficiency of data entry and retrieval and thus result in a system with high acceptance among physicians in the demanding environment during hospital rounds.

Access to Information↗
PubMed2002

Modelling the lay expert for first-year medical students: the actor-patient as teacher.

Actors are widely used in medical education as simulated patients. In this session, the role of actors was extended to 'simulated students' and facilitators in an introductory communication session. After an initial activity with the entire cohort of first-year students, groups of 20 students worked with either an actor or medical teacher in three activities. The activities aimed to raise students' awareness of the range of communication challenges in medical education and practice. After the session, students completed evaluation forms based on their experiences in the session. The results revealed no difference between students who were facilitated by actors or medical teachers in relation to meeting the learning objectives and their ratings of the usefulness of the activities to support learning. The actors who participated in this session were experienced in working with medical students. Their enhanced role provides students with an opportunity to identify with and reflect on the expertise of a lay teacher and to consider extending their definition of a learning opportunity to more informal encounters.

Communication↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Best practices in quality leadership.

In today's competitive healthcare market, leaders face increasing pressure to ensure rapid and lasting improvements at their facilities. Typically, such improvements happen only when senior management provides leadership in two areas--structure and culture. Often this means completely revamping inadequate information systems and developing a better understanding of improvement technology. By employing a number of strategies, such as benchmarking, implementing practice guidelines, and other tactics to make optimal use of existing information, and establishing formal learning plans, healthcare leaders can effect significant and continuing quality improvements within their facilities.

Data Collection↗
PubMed1997

To inform or not to inform--a decision with psychobiological implication.

A patient, being informed about his dangerous or even fatal disease, like cancer, has a higher chance to give up and display a renunciation of search activity. Such renunciation decreases body resistance and makes the overall situation hopeless. Thus a person has the right to be not informed about such diseases, because he has the right to use all his inner resources for survival.

Helplessness, Learned↗
PubMed2004

Using immediate memory span to measure implicit learning.

To avoid some conceptual and methodological pitfalls found in traditional artificial grammar learning tasks, we developed a new method of measuring implicit learning using immediate memory span. Subjects were presented with sequences generated by an artificial grammar and were asked to reproduce the patterns by pressing buttons on a response box. After exposure to these sequences, subjects showed selective improvement in immediate memory span for novel sequences governed by the same grammar. Individual differences in implicit learning covaried with measures of auditory digit span. Subjects with greater immediate memory processing capacity were better able to learn and subsequently exploit the information available in grammatical sequences. Our results are consistent with a detailed episodic coding framework in which implicit learning occurs as an incidental by-product of explicit task performance. Although subjects encode highly detailed information about specific instances, they use different aspects of this information to accomplish different task-specific demands.

Humans↗
PubMed1997

Validity of the PAS-ADD for detecting psychiatric symptoms in adults with learning disability (mental retardation).

The Psychiatric Assessment Schedule for Adults with Developmental Disability (PAS-ADD) is a semi-structured interview for use with respondents who have learning disability and for key informants. This report investigates the ability of the instrument to detect symptoms that had been found to exist during routine clinical assessment of the patients. Field trials involved 95 referred patients with learning disability and a key informant for each sample member. Clinical opinions of the referring psychiatrists were sought using a symptom checklist. Referrer checklist symptoms and PAS-ADD data were both factor analysed. Validity testing involved (a) computation of correlations between PAS-ADD factors and checklist data and (b) comparison of PAS-ADD and referrers' diagnoses. Results indicated good validity for the PAS-ADD in relation to psychotic symptoms and depressive symptoms. Anxiety symptom identification was not well validated, probably due to small numbers. Expansive mood identified by the referrers was not detected by the PAS-ADD because there is currently no corresponding section in the interview. Where the PAS-ADD produced a diagnosis (in 58 members of the sample), 44 were in agreement with the referrer. Probability of diagnosis by PAS-ADD increased with the number of relevant active symptoms identified by the referrer. The PAS-ADD has been shown in a previous report to have the sensitivity to detect mental disorders not known to psychiatric services. For psychotic and depressive conditions, our results showed that symptom detection was in good agreement with the information provided by the referring psychiatrists on their patients. The PAS-ADD needs a section on hypomania and further investigation of its detection of anxiety disorders.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

A learning resources centre: its utilization by medical students.

Innovations in medical education have led to the increasing use of problem-based learning techniques, a committee system organization, and more time for independent study in many undergraduate programmes. There has been an increase in availability of alternative methods for presentation of information. To encourage self-directed learning, resources such as computers, videos and models, among others, should be readily available to students. The University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine has provided various resources contained in one area, called the Bacs Learning Resource Centre (BLRC). Since the maintenance and further development of such a centre requires significant resources, it is important to determine student utilization of the various components used in their learning. For those who are about to set up such a learning resource centre this information gives guidance on which materials are most useful. The utilization of the centre by 69 first year medical students was studied using questionnaires. The utilization during a specific course was determined by analysing the entries in the individual log books given to the students at the beginning of the Integrative Course. With the exception of one student, all those who responded to the questionnaire used the Centre, with 20% or less of their total study time being spent there. The BLRC was most used for the Musculoskeletal, Cardiovascular and Reticulo-Endothelial courses. All categories of resources were found to be useful, with the tape/slides least utilized. Utilization was most influenced by the quality of resources available and recommendations by peers. The development of a centre such as the BLRC, with a variety of resources concentrated in one area, suitable for individual or group study and accessible 24 hours a day, should be considered by all medical schools to enhance self-directed learning in medical students.

Alberta↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Diabetes in the national TV news: 1971-1981.

Millions of Americans get virtually all their current events information from the national nightly television news programs. The purpose of this study was to learn what diabetes-related information had been broadcast over the last 11 years by the network news programs. Another objective was to learn how that coverage compared with that given other chronic diseases. The Vanderbilt Television News Archives (VTNA) has videotaped every ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly newscast since mid-1968. The contents of each telecast have been catalogued and indexed. Indexes were searched for every segment that had anything to do with diabetes from 1971 through 1981. In the last 11 years there have been 32 diabetes-related news segments. More than a third were about the controversial attempt to ban saccharin. Because each network may carry essentially the same story, the number of nonoverlapping reports was 20. The total time of the diabetes-related segments was 70 minutes. The topics covered by the news reports included oral agents (5 reports), artificial sweeteners (12), biosynthetic human insulin (BHI) (7), and an assortment of unique items. The 32 diabetes-related segments compare with 23 about arthritis, 215 about heart diseases, and 925 dealing with cancer. A compilation of the non-overlapping segments has been shown to health professionals, who felt the stories were generally accurate. Diabetes is not portrayed as a killer. Therefore, diabetes seems less serious, and therefore less newsworthy, than heart disease or cancer.

Diabetes Mellitus↗
PubMed1997

The effects of type I and type II corticosteroid receptor agonists on exploratory behavior and spatial memory in the Y-maze.

We investigated the effects of two adrenal steroid agonists on adrenalectomized (ADX) rats' performance on the Y-maze. The Y-maze was chosen because memory can be assessed quickly and because it is sensitive to various parameters of exploratory behavior and spatial memory performance. Four days after surgery, ADX rats were injected with aldosterone (ALDO, a selective Type I receptor agonist), RU362 (a selective Type II receptor agonist) or sesame vehicle at three different time points (120 min prior to Trial 1, immediately after Trial 1 or 120 min after Trial 1). SHAM-operated rats injected with vehicle were also tested. The results indicate that vehicle-treated ADX rats were impaired on spatial recognition memory compared to SHAM rats. Treatment with ALDO restored spatial recognition memory performance of ADX rats to a level comparable to SHAM-treated rats by acting on acquisition and consolidation, whereas treatment with RU362 did not change the poor spatial recognition memory performance of ADX rats. Discrimination memory was improved only when either agonist was injected prior to the first trial, strongly suggesting a non-selective effect of corticosteroids on discrimination memory such as increasing arousal. A detailed analysis of exploratory behavior showed that both the ALDO- and RU362-treated rats explored the Y-maze more than the ADX and SHAM groups at all periods of the experiment. These results show that the non-specific increase in exploratory behavior induced by replacing corticosteroids targeted at Type I and Type II receptors was used differentially with the ALDO-treated rats learning and consolidating spatial information better than the RU362-treated rats. These data are discussed along with other evidence to suggest that Type II receptors may require the simultaneous occupancy of Type I receptors to affect learning and memory processes.

Adrenalectomy↗
PubMed1975

Passive avoidance behavior in rats after electroconvulsive shock: facilitative effect of response retardation.

Rats were trained in a one-trial passive avoidance task and then were submitted to electroconvulsive shock (ECS) or to sham ECS. Twenty-four hours later they were tested for retention, with the door opened either immediately or 30 sec after the beginning of the test. Rats initially forced to avoid for 30 sec continued to avoid for the entire test, but the others had the usual low step-through latencies seen with ECS-treated animals. Activity measures for those animals stepping through differentiated groups having received footshock from those not having footshock and ECS. A retest 5--10 min later showed "recovery" in the amnestic animals and continued avoidance behavior for those that avoided on the first test. Results are taken as evidence that ECS effects are not on memory storage but on the capacity of the animal to organize information effectively and quickly in order to produce an adaptive response.

Animals↗
PubMed1997

Increasing the effectiveness of your teaching program for the elderly: assessing the client's readiness to learn.

The education of the elderly person is a critical component of nursing interventions for health maintenance and illness prevention in the elderly. Teaching and learning transactions require great skill under the best of circumstances, but they take on new demands and require different skills when the client is ill and feels vulnerable. To maximize an educational opportunity, the nurse must be able to understand the factors that may inhibit successful learning and be very astute in assessing and re-evaluating the client's readiness and capacity to learn at a specific time. It is imperative that nurses realize that taking the time to assess a client's readiness to learn and utilizing the information that is gathered to develop a teaching plan that best meets the clients needs increase the likelihood of a successful teaching/learning event for both the nurse and the client. The information should assist the health care worker's ability to give older persons the tools and information that they require to assist them to maintain optimum independence and a better quality of life. Hopefully, the end result will be a win-win encounter for all involved in the learning experience.

Aged↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Independent component analysis of temporal sequences subject to constraints by lateral geniculate nucleus inputs yields all the three major cell types of the primary visual cortex.

Information maximization has long been suggested as the underlying coding strategy of the primary visual cortex (V1). Grouping image sequences into blocks has been shown by others to improve agreement between experiments and theory. We have studied the effect of temporal convolution on the formation of spatiotemporal filters--that is, the analogues of receptive fields--since this temporal feature is characteristic to the response function of lagged and non-lagged cells of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Concatenated input sequences were used to learn the linear transformation that maximizes the information transfer. Learning was accomplished by means of principal component analysis and independent component analysis. Properties of the emerging spatiotemporal filters closely resemble the three major types of V1 cells: simple cells with separable receptive field, simple cells with non-separable receptive field, and complex cells.

Action Potentials↗
PubMed2000

Cognitive models in training health professionals to protect patients' confidential information.

Recent advances in theories of learning and knowledge acquisition in culturally-situated environments have illuminated the role of cognition in changing behavior, and in turn on influencing performance for the long term. One such advance focuses on the relationship between explicit formal training and implicit knowledge acquired through daily interactive activities in schools and organizations. The former relates more to instruction regarding the policy issues whereas the latter is tied closely to cultural, moral and organizational values. In this paper, we draw on these theories of cognition and learning to show the shift in thinking that is needed regarding education of health professionals, including steps required to assure that the protection of confidential information becomes part of their routine practices. Illustrative examples are used to show the nature of conceptual change in the health professional's knowledge organization and reasoning strategies that is necessary for more sustained behavior change with regards to protecting data confidentiality and privacy of individual patients. This re-conceptualization is intended to be reflected at various levels of training and education for health professionals, including influences on personal and organizational practices as well as revisions in medical-school and graduate-medical curricula.

Cognition↗
PubMed2005

Factors affecting people with intellectual disabilities in learning to use computer technology.

Using information technology (IT) in work and leisure has become an essential part of life. However, people with intellectual disabilities (ID) may have difficulties in learning the complex skills involved in IT. The aim of this study was to explore (1) level of competency in IT, (2) requirements to learn IT and (3) factors related to IT competency for people with ID. Three-hundred-and-fifty-three adults (age 16 years or above, mean age=28.77 years) with ID were assessed on basic IT skills using a self-developed skill-based checklist including the use of the keyboard and mouse and getting onto the Internet. A short questionnaire was sent out to the parents and caregivers to explore the various factors affecting the learning-teaching process. Results indicated that only 6.2% (22) of the participants knew how to operate the keyboard and mouse and 9.1% (32) were able to get onto the Internet; 33.1% of participants could not operate the computer system at all. Younger people with ID and with mild-grade ID have better IT skills. Three-hundred-and-twenty-seven (92.6%) caregivers reported that although they had a computer in their home or at their work place, people with ID were not given any opportunity to use it. They also reported difficulties in training people with ID to use IT due to insufficient knowledge on training techniques and a lack of software that is suitable for training. As modern society relies more and more on IT in daily activities, the poor computer competency of people with ID may lower their level of participation in leisure, functional and vocational aspects of life. Their general perception was that with sufficient training and support, people with ID could also join the world of IT.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

[Value of different systems of mammography records with regard to their exposure to radiation and their information content (author's transl)].

We learned from our examinations that, if there were optimum conditions, the combination Medichrome MR50 as a form of low dose method offers the same information content as the film without intensifying screens PE 4006. We found out that the discernibleness of details of 70 non selected mammographies which had each been taken by both systems was absolutely identical. By xeroradiography, however, a more precise representation of details, especially if there are microcalcifications, is possible because of its effect which renders the edges more visible. If the Medichrome low dose method was applied, the exposure to radiation of the breast was, depending on the density and width or the organ, only 1/12 to 1/14 of the dose measured if the film without intensifying screens was used. The exposure to radiation connected with xeroradiography is between these two values. We came to the following conclusion: the low dose method is recommended for routine mammographies, and only if there are special problems or if suspicious findings are to be clarified, xeroradiography is applied as supplementary examination method. Before using the film without intensifying screens, one should consider the high radiation exposure which, however, does not involve a greater information content.

Breast Neoplasms↗
PubMed1989

Hypermedia in radiology: computer-assisted education.

Hypertext is a new computer-based method of presenting information that provides greater flexibility than conventional methods of continuing education. With a hypertext system, an individual using the computer can acquire more information on a word or concept that needs to be pursued in depth. Hypermedia is an expanded concept which uses the computer's ability to incorporate images, sounds, and video images in addition to text. This interactive, multimedia approach customizes information for more effective learning. The authors devised a prototype hypermedia textbook of nuclear medicine using a personal computer with hypermedia software that contains text, graphs, tables, figures, literature citations, and an easily persuable image database. All the information is organized with multiple cross-references, allowing instant branching to relevant facts, in different levels of detail. The system's applications and the ease of expansion or modification by the user are described.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗