Contribution of sustained attention abilities to real-world academic skills in children.

Sustained attention is a critical cognitive ability that improves over the course of development and predicts important real-world outcomes, such as academic achievement. However, the majority of work demonstrating links between sustained attention and academic skills has been conducted in lab-based settings that lack the ecological validity of a more naturalistic environment, like school. Further, most studies focus on targeted academic measures of specific sub-skills and have not fully examined whether this relationship generalizes to broad measures of academic achievement that are used for important, real-world, academic advancement decisions, such as standardized test scores. To address this gap, we examined the role of sustained attention in predicting targeted and broad assessments of academic abilities, where all skills were assessed in group-based environments in schools. In a sample of over 700 students aged 9-14, we showed that attention was positively related to performance on targeted assessments (math fluency and reading comprehension), as well as broad academic measures (statewide standardized test scores). Moreover, we found that attention was more predictive of targeted math sub-skills compared to assessments of broad math abilities, but was equally predictive of reading for both types of measures. Our findings add to our understanding of how sustained attention is linked to academic skills assessed in more 'real-world', naturalistic school environments and have important implications for designing tools to support student's academic success.

Linking musical metaphors and emotions evoked by the sound of classical music.

Musical meaning is often described in terms of emotions and metaphors. While many theories encapsulate one or the other, very little empirical data is available to test a possible link between the two. In this article, we examined the metaphorical and emotional contents of Western classical music using the answers of 162 participants. We calculated generalized linear mixed-effects models, correlations, and multidimensional scaling to connect emotions and metaphors. It resulted in each metaphor being associated with different specific emotions, subjective levels of entrainment, and acoustic and perceptual characteristics. How these constructs relate to one another could be based on the embodied knowledge and the perception of movement in space. For instance, metaphors that rely on movement are related to emotions associated with movement. In addition, measures in this study could also be represented by underlying dimensions such as valence and arousal. Musical writing and music education could benefit greatly from these results. Finally, we suggest that music researchers consider musical metaphors in their work as we provide an empirical method for it.

Simulation as a Training Method for Electricity Workers' Safety.

BACKGROUND: Simulation is a useful method to improve learning and increase the safety of work operations, both for technical and non-technical skills. However, the observation, assessment, and feedback about these skills is particularly complex, because the process needs expert observers, and the feedback could be judgmental and ineffective. Therefore, a structured process to develop effective simulation scenarios and tools for the observation and feedback about performance is crucial. To this aim, in the present research, we developed a training model for electricity distribution workers, based on high fidelity simulation. METHODS: We designed simulation scenarios based on real cases, developed, and tested a set of observation and rating forms for the non-technical skills behavioral markers, and we tracked behaviors based on non-verbal cues (physiological and head orientation parameters). RESULTS: The training methodology proved to be highly appreciated by the participants and effective in fostering reflexivity. An in-depth analysis of physiological indexes and behaviors compliant to safety procedures revealed that breath rate and heart rate patterns commonly related with mindful and relaxed states were correlated with compliant behaviors, and patterns typical of stress and anxiety were correlated with non-compliant behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: a new training method based on high fidelity simulation, addressing both technical and non-technical skills is now available for fostering self-reflection and safety for electricity distribution workers. Future research should assess the long-term effectiveness of high-fidelity simulation for electricity workers, and should investigate non-invasive and real-time methods for tracking physiological parameters.

Unfolding and dynamics of affect bursts decoding in humans.

The unfolding dynamics of the vocal expression of emotions are crucial for the decoding of the emotional state of an individual. In this study, we analyzed how much information is needed to decode a vocally expressed emotion using affect bursts, a gating paradigm, and linear mixed models. We showed that some emotions (fear, anger, disgust) were significantly better recognized at full-duration than others (joy, sadness, neutral). As predicted, recognition improved when greater proportion of the stimuli was presented. Emotion recognition curves for anger and disgust were best described by higher order polynomials (second to third), while fear, sadness, neutral, and joy were best described by linear relationships. Acoustic features were extracted for each stimulus and subjected to a principal component analysis for each emotion. The principal components were successfully used to partially predict the accuracy of recognition (i.e., for anger, a component encompassing acoustic features such as fundamental frequency (f0) and jitter; for joy, pitch and loudness range). Furthermore, the impact of the principal components on the recognition of anger, disgust, and sadness changed with longer portions being presented. These results support the importance of studying the unfolding conscious recognition of emotional vocalizations to reveal the differential contributions of specific acoustical feature sets. It is likely that these effects are due to the relevance of threatening information to the human mind and are related to urgent motor responses when people are exposed to potential threats as compared with emotions where no such urgent response is required (e.g., joy).