Jordan Richard Schoenherr

Does the uncanny valley exist? An empirical test of the relationship between eeriness and the human likeness of digitally created faces

The uncanny valley theory (UVT) (Mori, 1970) proposes that when stimuli are defined by a near-perfect resemblance to humans they cause people to experience greater negative affect relative to when they have perfect human likeness (HL) or little to no HL. Empirical research to support this non-linear relationship between negative affect and HL has been inconclusive, however, and a satisfactory causal explanation has not yet emerged to explain existing findings. In two studies, we examined the relationship between HL and eeriness using digital human faces. First, we examined the relationship between HL and eeriness while controlling for extraneous variation in stimulus appearance. We created two HL continua by manipulating the facial proportions and polygon count of several digital human models. Second, we proposed and tested two causal hypotheses regarding the uncanny valley phenomenon that we refer to as category conflict and feature atypicality. We created two additional HL continua by manipulating the skin coloration and category membership of models. Across these continua we introduced an atypical feature. Our results suggest that HL is linearly related to emotional response, except under conditions where HL varies by category membership, suggesting that previous empirical findings might be explained as a category conflict.

The Rapid Assessment of Competency in Echocardiography Scale Validation of a Tool for Point-of-Care Ultrasound

Increased use of point‐of‐care ultrasound (US) requires the development of assessment tools that measure the competency of learners. In this study, we developed and tested a tool to assess the quality of point‐of‐care cardiac US studies performed by novices.

Outcomes from extensive training in critical care echocardiography: Identifying the optimal number of practice studies required to achieve competency

Purpose Optimal instruction and assessment of critical care ultrasound (CCUS) skills requires an assessment tool to measure learner competency and changes over time. In this study, a previously published tool was used to monitor the development of critical care echocardiography (CCE) competencies, the attainment of performance plateaus, and the extent to which previous experience influenced learning. Materials and methods A group of experts used the Rapid Assessment of Competency in Echocardiography (RACE) scale to rate a large pool of CCE studies performed by novices in a longitudinal design. A total of 380 studies performed by twelve learners were assessed; each study was independently rated by two experts. Results Learners demonstrated improvement in mean RACE scores over time, with peak performance occurring early in training and a performance plateau thereafter. Learners with little experience received the greatest benefit from training, with an average performance plateau reached at the twentieth study. Conclusions Supporting earlier results, the RACE scale provided a straightforward means to assess learner performance with minimal requirements for evaluator training. The results of the present study suggest that novices experience the greatest gains in competency during their first twenty practice studies, a threshold which should serve to guide training initiatives. HighlightsWith the rise of point‐of‐care ultrasound and competency‐based education, there is an urgent need to tools to assess competencyA previously validated assessment tool was applied to a large cohort of cardiac ultrasound scans performed by novicesLeaners improved until the twentieth practice scan; this effect was more pronounced in less experienced leanersThe results suggest a threshold of twenty practice scans for learners as a reasonable starting point in training

Selective attention and subjective confidence calibration

In the present experiments, failures of selective visual attention were invoked using the B. A. Eriksen and C. W. Eriksen (1974) flanker task. On each trial, a three-letter stimulus array was flashed briefly, followed by a mask. The identity of the two flanking letters was response congruent, neutral, or incongruent with the identity of the middle target letter. On half of the trials, confidence ratings were obtained after each response. In the first three experiments, participants were highly overconfident in the accuracy of their responding to incongruent flanker stimulus arrays. In a final experiment, presenting a prestimulus target location cue greatly reduced both selective attention failure and overconfidence. The findings demonstrate that participants are often unaware of such selective attention failures and provide support for the notion that, in these cases, decisional processing is driven largely by the identities of the incongruent flankers. In addition, responding was invariably slower and sometimes more accurate when confidence was required than when it was not required, demonstrating that the need to provide posttrial confidence reports can affect decisional processing. Moreover, there was some evidence that the presence of neutral contextual flanking information can slow responding, suggesting that such nondiagnostic information can, indeed, contribute to decisional processing.

Psychometrics and its discontents: an historical perspective on the discourse of the measurement tradition.

Psychometrics has recently undergone extensive criticism within the medical education literature. The use of quantitative measurement using psychometric instruments such as response scales is thought to emphasize a narrow range of relevant learner skills and competencies. Recent reviews and commentaries suggest that a paradigm shift might be presently underway. We argue for caution, in that the psychometrics approach and the quantitative account of competencies that it reflects is based on a rich discussion regarding measurement and scaling that led to the establishment of this paradigm. Rather than reflecting a homogeneous discipline focused on core competencies devoid of consideration of context, the psychometric community has a history of discourse and debate within the field, with an acknowledgement that the techniques and instruments developed within psychometrics are heuristics that must be used pragmatically.

Beyond Fidelity: Deconstructing the Seductive Simplicity of Fidelity in Simulator-based Education in the Health Care Professions

STATEMENT Fidelity has become a ubiquitous feature of discourse in simulation studies. Recent studies have highlighted the often ambiguous and contradictory manner in which fidelity has been defined, with each definition emphasizing different physical and functional features of simulation. We suggest that regarding fidelity as an objective property of a simulation obscures the interactive nature of the educator-learner relationship and should be abandoned. Rather than conceiving training as tasks performed by an individual in isolation, we suggest that it is more accurately understood as the social learning of affordances. Affordances represent the functional features of a simulator, which are taken as relevant in a specific learning context by means of analogy. Training is successful to the extent that educators and learners share an understanding of those affordances. Even when explicitly formulated, the concept of fidelity has greater difficulty accounting for the complex, interactional features of the training situation in comparison with accounts based on social learning. We conclude that continued attempts to redefine and use fidelity in the context of training will likely yield little benefit to the field compared with an interactive social learning framework.

Scientific integrity in research methods

Recent cases of research misconduct have prompted psychologists to suggest that there is too much vulnerability in the research process (e.g., Simmons et al., 2011; Pashler and Harris, 2012). Regardless of whether this is the case, ensuring the integrity of a discipline requires a clear understanding of what conventions and norms define the research process. In what follows, I consider the research integrity curriculum of North American psychology. In particular, I will claim that a major impediment to ensuring responsible research practices is an underspecified and understudied curriculum.

Social-cognitive barriers to ethical authorship

The apparent increase in research misconduct in the scientific literature has caused considerable alarm in both the biomedical (Benos et al., 2005; Smith, 2006) and psychological research communities (Stroebe et al., 2012). An understanding of research misconduct must be informed by the recognition that the norms of science might be quite general (e.g., Merton, 1942; Bronowski, 1965), ambiguous (Cournand and Meyer, 1976), or even contradictory (e.g., Mitroff, 1974; Ziman, 2000), leading to possible disagreements in terms of what constitutes misconduct within a research community (Fields and Price, 1993; Berk et al., 2000; Al-Marzouki et al., 2005). Considerable insight can be gained from research on behavioral ethics (e.g., Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011; Ariely, 2012; Greene, 2013). Using inappropriate authorship practices as an illustrative example, I consider the role of social-cognitive mechanisms in research misconduct while also suggesting preventative measures.

Multi-Agent Accumulator-Based Decision-Making Model of Incivility (MADI)

While behaviour can either be perceived as respectful or disrespectful, incivility reflects relatively minor violations of social norms within a group. In the present study, we used an accumulator-based model of decision-making, assuming that social agents attempt to classify behaviour as respectful or disrespectful based on available social cues and reciprocate toward other group members once a criterion amount of evidence is accumulated. Perceived incivility is derived from the model by taking the balance of evidence of the respectful and disrespectful social cues, reflecting uncertainty in decision-making. In multi-agent interactions, the model averages perceived incivility (i.e., uncertainty) over multiple trials. We demonstrate that this model can differentiate between attitudes and behavior in a single social agent as well as how incivility can arise within a group as a result of small differences in response threshold to disrespectful behaviour and biases in social cue identification accuracy.

Expert Agreement in the Interpretation of Lung Ultrasound Studies Performed on Mechanically Ventilated Patients: Expert Agreement in Lung Ultrasound

Although lung ultrasound (US) has been shown to have high diagnostic accuracy in patients presenting with acute dyspnea, its precision in critically ill patients is unknown. We investigated common areas of agreement and disagreement by studying 6 experts as they interpreted lung US studies in a cohort of intensive care unit (ICU) patients.