Adoption of pharmacogenomic testing by US physicians: results of a nationwide survey.

To develop a benchmark measure of US physicians' level of knowledge and extent of use of pharmacogenomic testing, we conducted an anonymous, cross-sectional, fax-based, national survey. Of 397,832 physicians receiving the survey questionnaire, 10,303 (3%) completed and returned it; the respondents were representative of the overall US physician population. The factors associated with the decision to test were evaluated using χ(2) and multivariate logistic regression. Overall, 97.6% of responding physicians agreed that genetic variations may influence drug response, but only 10.3% felt adequately informed about pharmacogenomic testing. Only 12.9% of physicians had ordered a test in the previous 6 months, and 26.4% anticipated ordering a test in the next 6 months. Early and future adopters of testing were more likely to have received training in pharmacogenomics, but only 29.0% of physicians overall had received any education in the field. Our findings highlight the need for more effective physician education on the clinical value, availability, and interpretation of pharmacogenomic tests.

Linguistic and acoustic correlates of the perceptual structure found in an individual differences scaling study of vowels.

Subjects judged the similarities among a set of American English vowels (See Text) presented in isolation or in a/dVd/ consonantal frame. Individual differences scaling was employed to analyze these similarities data for each of the conditions separately and for the two conditions combined. In all cases, perceptual dimensions corresponding to the advancement, height, and tenseness vowel features were recovered. Given the determinacy of individual differences scaling, this finding is taken to provide strong evidence for the perceptual significance of those features. The perceptual dimensions are considered in relation to various acoustic parameters of the stimuli employed in this study. They are also considered in relation to perceptual dimensions that have been observed in other vowel scaling studies.

Auditory perception of breaking and bouncing events: a case study in ecological acoustics.

The mechanical events of bouncing and breaking are acoustically specified by single versus multiple damped quasi-periodic pulse patterns, with an initial noise burst in the case of breaking. Subjects show high accuracy in categorizing natural tokens of bouncing and breaking glass as well as tokens constructed by adjusting only the temporal patterns of components, leaving their spectral properties constant. Differences in average spectral frequency are, therefore, not necessary for perceiving this contrast, though differences in spectral consistency over successive pulses may be important. Initial noise corresponding to glass rupture appears unnecessary to categorize breaking and bouncing. The data indicate that higher order temporal properties of the acoustic signal provide information for the auditory perception of these events.

Monitoring for vowels in isolation and in a consonantal context.

The identifiability of isolated vowels (/V/) was compared to that of vowels in consonantal context (/pVp/) when subjects performed a monitoring task. On successive blocks of trials in a test series, the subjects listened for instances of one or another of nine monophthongal vowels (Formula: see text) and identified each test item as being an instance or not. On average, resulting false alarm errors occurred significantly less often in the /pVp/ condition, consistent with the previous finding that vowel perception may be aided by consonantal context. This beneficial effect of context was found to be restricted to the class of open vowels, however, with perception of the close vowels being somewhat hindered by context. The error data for misses also showed an interaction between context and vowel height. Various accounts of the interaction are considered.