GFMT2: A psychometric measure of face matching ability.

We present an expanded version of a widely used measure of unfamiliar face matching ability, the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT). The GFMT2 is created using the same source database as the original test but makes five key improvements. First, the test items include variation in head angle, pose, expression and subject-to-camera distance, making the new test more difficult and more representative of challenges in everyday face identification tasks. Second, short and long versions of the test each contain two forms that are calibrated to be of equal difficulty, allowing repeat tests to be performed to examine effects of training interventions. Third, the short-form tests contain no repeating face identities, thereby removing any confounding effects of familiarity that may have been present in the original test. Fourth, separate short versions are created to target exceptionally high performing or exceptionally low performing individuals using established psychometric principles. Fifth, all tests are implemented in an executable program, allowing them to be administered automatically. All tests are available free for scientific use via www.gfmt2.org .

Real world familiarity does not reduce susceptibility to emotional disruption of perception: evidence from two temporal attention tasks.

The visual system has been found to prioritise emotional stimuli so robustly that their presence can temporarily "blind" people to non-emotional targets in their direct line of vision. This has ostensible implications for the real world: medics must not be blinded to important information despite the trauma they confront, and drivers must not be blinded when passing emotionally engaging billboards. One possibility is that the familiarity of goal-relevant information can protect people's perception of it despite emotional distraction (e.g. drivers' perception might be less impaired by graphic ads when on a familiar road). In two experiments, we tested whether familiarity renders targets more perceptible following the presentation of an emotional distractor in two temporal attention tasks, emotion-induced blindness (Experiment 1) and the attentional blink (Experiment 2). Targets were pictures of familiar or unfamiliar locations. Although, overall, familiar targets were seen better than unfamiliar targets in both studies, stimulus familiarity did not reduce the relative perceptual impairments caused by emotional distractors.

Context-dependent similarity effects in letter recognition.

In visual word recognition tasks, digit primes that are visually similar to letter string targets (e.g., 4/A, 8/B) are known to facilitate letter identification relative to visually dissimilar digits (e.g., 6/A, 7/B); in contrast, with letter primes, visual similarity effects have been elusive. In the present study we show that the visual similarity effect with letter primes can be made to come and go, depending on whether it is necessary to discriminate between visually similar letters. The results support a Bayesian view which regards letter recognition not as a passive activation process driven by the fixed stimulus properties, but as a dynamic evidence accumulation process for a decision that is guided by the task context.

The role of treatment intentions and concerns about side effects in women's decision to discontinue postmenopausal hormone therapy.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the factors that influence women's decisions about hormone therapy use and the duration of use, in particular the effect of women's reasons for initiating hormone therapy, the source of information about hormones, women's symptom experience, and their concerns about side effects from hormone therapy. METHODS: Eight hundred and sixteen women aged 45-59 who began hormone therapy between July 1993 and June 1995 in a Massachusetts health maintenance organization were followed for two years from the day they received a prescription for estrogen. This cohort has been previously studied for health, treatment and demographic determinants of hormone therapy discontinuation. In March 1999, these women were mailed a questionnaire containing closed and open-ended questions. 449 women (55%) completed the survey. Discrete-time hazards models were used to identify determinants of discontinuation, controlling for medical predictors of survey nonresponse. RESULTS: Women's assessment of the difficulty of their decision to use hormone therapy (RR=1.25 for each point on a 7-point scale, 95% CI: 1.16, 1.35) was associated with discontinuation. Women who described their decision as extremely difficult had the greatest likelihood of discontinuing. The importance placed on preventing osteoporosis (RR=0.93 for each point on a 7-point scale, 95% CI: 0.86, 0.99) and cardiovascular disease (RR=0.94 for each point on a 7-point scale, 95% CI: 0.88, 0.99) were also statistically significant predictors of discontinuation. Women for whom the prevention of osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease were extremely important in deciding to use hormone therapy were the most likely to continue using hormones. Concerns about the return of monthly bleeding (RR=3.00, 95% CI: 1.45, 6.17) and weight gain (RR=2.06, 95% CI: 1.16, 3.67) at the time hormone therapy was initiated, but not the actual experience of these side effects while using hormones, were associated with a higher rate of discontinuation. Symptoms around the time of initiating hormone therapy, including the perceived severity of the symptom, were not statistically associated with discontinuation. CONCLUSIONS: Discontinuation of hormone therapy is the result of a complex process of decision-making that is influenced by the value placed on the prevention of osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease at the time of initiation and women's perceptions and interpretations of side effects. Concerns about the potential side effects of hormone therapy, in particular weight gain and monthly bleeding, lead women to discontinue hormone therapy.