Burden and positive aspects of caregiving: cluster profiles of dementia caregiving experiences.

OBJECTIVES: Although caregiver burden is common in the context of dementia caregiving, the caregiving role is linked to beneficial outcomes too. Individuals reporting higher positive aspects of caregiving tend to exhibit lower burden relative to those reporting few. The goal of this retrospective review of outpatient memory clinic medical records was to demonstrate whether and how constructs of burden and positive aspects of caregiving coexist within individual caregivers, and to explore potential contributors to caregiver profiles created based upon these constructs. METHOD: Cluster analyses were conducted on 1160 caregivers from an initial intake interview meeting criteria on primary measures of Positive Aspects of Caregiving and the Zarit Burden Interview and repeated with 225 caregivers meeting inclusion criteria on all measures. Samples were compared for similarity, and the smaller sample (n = 225) was deemed appropriately representative. Multinomial logistic regressions examined cluster predictors in sample with 225 caregivers. RESULTS: Results suggested a three-cluster solution: a High Burden group, a High Positive Experiences group, and a Low-Moderate Experiences group showing low burden and moderate positive experiences. Greater behavioral problems predicted belonging to the High Burden cluster. Greater care recipient dependence predicted belonging to the High Positive Experiences cluster while greater independence predicted the Low-Moderate Experiences cluster. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that burden and positive aspects of caregiving do not simultaneously present in caregivers at high levels. Supportive caregiver interventions might be tailored to profiles demonstrated here. Future research should investigate other potential contributors to experiences of burden and positive aspects of caregiving.

The Relationship between Executive Functions and Metacognition in College Students.

This study investigated the relationship between executive functions and metacognition. Both constructs have been well-studied, but little research has focused on their connections. The goal of the current investigation was to increase the understanding of the relationship between metacognition and executive functions by assessing the relationships between metacognitive monitoring accuracy and the three component executive functions (updating, inhibition, and shifting) among college students. Metacognitive monitoring accuracy was measured using a knowledge monitoring accuracy (KMA) test. The three components of executive functions, updating, inhibition, and shifting were measured, respectively, using the ABCD updating task, the Stroop color-word interference test, and the letter-number task. The Tower of Hanoi task was used to measure the complex executive functions (inhibition and updating). Correlation and regression analyses were performed to examine the relationships. The results indicate that updating is the only component executive function that significantly correlated with metacognitive monitoring, suggesting that metacognition-specifically, metacognitive monitoring-is associated with at least one component of executive functioning.

Metacognitive Cues, Working Memory, and Math Anxiety: The Regulated Attention in Mathematical Problem Solving (RAMPS) Framework.

Mathematical problem solving is a process involving metacognitive (e.g., judging progress), cognitive (e.g., working memory), and affective (e.g., math anxiety) factors. Recent research encourages researchers who study math cognition to consider the role that the interaction between metacognition and math anxiety plays in mathematical problem solving. Problem solvers can make many metacognitive judgments during a math problem, ranging from global judgments such as, "Do I care to solve this problem?" to minor cue-based judgments such as, "Is my current strategy successful in making progress toward the correct solution?" Metacognitive monitoring can hinder accurate mathematical problem solving when the monitoring is task-irrelevant; however, task-relevant metacognitive experiences can lead to helpful control decisions in mathematical problem solving such as checking work, considering plausibility of an answer, and considering alternate strategies. Worry and negative thoughts (i.e., math anxiety) can both interfere with the accuracy of metacognitive experiences as cues in mathematical problem solving and lead to avoidance of metacognitive control decisions that could otherwise improve performance. The current paper briefly reviews and incorporates prior literature with current qualitative reports (n = 673) to establish a novel framework of regulated attention in mathematical problem solving (RAMPS).

Self-paced acceptance and commitment training reduces burden transfer, stress, and burnout in veterinary healthcare teams.

OBJECTIVE: An acceptance and commitment training (ACT) educational program targeting reaction to difficult client interactions recently demonstrated efficacy in reducing burden transfer, stress, and burnout in veterinary healthcare teams. The current noninferiority trial compared effectiveness of the original program with a self-paced version. SAMPLE: Employees of 2 corporate veterinary groups were randomized to live (n = 128) or self-paced (124) conditions. The workshop and assessments were completed by 137 (55 live and 82 self-paced). PROCEDURES: Asynchronous modules containing the same content as the original program were placed on in-house veterinary clinic learning systems. Participants of this parallel arms trial completed pretest measures of burden transfer, stress, and burnout. Following assessment, the 3-week ACT program was delivered via videoconferencing (live) or asynchronous modules (self-paced). At post-test and 1-month follow-up, measures were repeated, with added assessment of knowledge, helpfulness ratings, and usage of techniques. A subset (n = 33) of participants repeated measures 9 to 12 months as an extended follow-up. RESULTS: Program helpfulness was rated more highly by live versus self-paced participants. Self-paced showed better program retention. No differences in knowledge or use of program techniques (> 5 times daily) emerged. Relative to pretest, both conditions showed reduced burden transfer, stress, and burnout at post-test and follow-up; no differences by condition emerged. Participants completing extended follow-up maintained improvement from baseline. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Findings suggest a learning system-based version of this program can improve occupational distress in veterinary healthcare teams, with gains maintained over time. The flexibility of this format promotes program completion and allows broader dissemination.

An acceptance and commitment training program reduces burden transfer, stress, and burnout among veterinary healthcare teams.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether an acceptance and commitment training (ACT) program targeting reactions to difficult client interactions would reduce burden transfer, stress, and burnout among veterinary healthcare teams. SAMPLE: Small animal veterinary hospital employees randomly assigned to participate in an ACT program (intervention group; n = 72) or to not undergo the training program (control group; 71). PROCEDURES: The study was designed as a randomized, controlled, parallel-arms trial. All participants completed prestudy assessments of burden transfer, stress, and burnout. The ACT program consisted of 3 small-group-format educational sessions tailored to reducing reactivity to difficult veterinary client interactions; sessions were delivered via video teleconference. At the end of the educational sessions (posttest) and 1 month later (1-month follow-up), assessments of burden transfer, stress, and burnout were repeated, and participants in the intervention group provided ratings of program helpfulness and frequency of use for techniques taught in the program. RESULTS: Participants receiving the program rated it as helpful and reported frequent use of program techniques. Relative to the control group, the intervention group showed significantly reduced burden transfer, stress, work-related burnout, and client-related burnout after completing the educational sessions. These improvements were maintained at the 1-month follow-up. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Findings support the usefulness of this program in reducing occupational distress in veterinary medicine. Future work is needed to examine whether it is similarly effective in formats that could be more broadly disseminated (eg, asynchronous, self-paced, independent learning).

Mind wandering probes as a source of mind wandering depends on attention control demands.

Mind wandering is a topic of great interest in many areas, but as with all psychological constructs, the interpretation of experimental results might depend on the way it is measured. A common way of measuring mind wandering in experiments is with self-report thought probes. An important question with this methodology is if the probe itself may be influencing participants' mind wandering. Previous research suggests that multiple thought probes throughout a task may lead to less mind wandering. However, in some studies (e.g., Schubert et al, 2019) the probes occurred during a recorded lecture video and in the others (e.g., Seli et al, 2016) the probes occurred during a sustained attention to response task (SART). What is missing in the current literature is a comparison of the effect the number of thought probes has on mind wandering during a task that requires a greater deal of thought control throughout the task to perform well, such as a complex span task or working memory. As such, in the two experiments presented here we randomly assigned participants to one of four conditions. Conditions contained a minimum of one and a maximum of six probes. In the first experiment, we found that participants who had received fewer probes mind wandered less during an operation span task, supporting our hypothesis. In the second experiment, we found that participants who had received fewer probes mind wandered more during a video lecture. The results suggest that thought probes interact with attentional control demands to influence mind wandering.

Factors of Dementia Caregiver Burden Differentially Contribute to Desire to Institutionalize.

The experience of dementia caregiver burden is multidimensional. Little is known about how different aspects of burden contribute to the consideration of moving a loved one to a structured living facility. In the present study, caregiver burden (Zarit Burden Interview; ZBI) and consideration of structured living arrangements (Desire to Institutionalize Scale; DIS) were self-reported by 339 caregivers. Exploratory factor analysis was used to determine the ZBI factor structure; these factors were then examined via hierarchical linear regression for prediction of DIS. Factor analysis indicated a 4-factor ZBI solution: Impact on Life, Guilt, Embarrassment/Frustration, and Escape/Uncertainty. Regression analyses indicated that only Escape/Uncertainty (p < .001) was associated with DIS. Of the 4 identified factors of caregiver burden, desire to escape the caregiving role was most related to consideration of structured living arrangements. Future work should explore longitudinal contribution of this factor to determine its role in actual changes made in living arrangements.

Reconceptualizing Symbolic Magnitude Estimation Training Using Non-declarative Learning Techniques.

It is well-documented that mathematics achievement is an important predictor of many positive life outcomes like college graduation, career opportunities, salary, and even citizenship. As such, it is important for researchers and educators to help students succeed in mathematics. Although there are undoubtedly many factors that contribute to students' success in mathematics, much of the research and intervention development has focused on variations in instructional techniques. Indeed, even a cursory glance at many educational journals and granting agencies reveals that there is a large amount of time, energy, and resources being spent on determining the best way to convey information through direct, declarative instruction. The proposed project is motivated by recent calls to expand the focus of research in mathematics education beyond direct, declarative instruction. The overarching goal of the presented experiment is to evaluate the efficacy of a novel mathematics intervention designed using principles taken from the literature on non-declarative learning. The intervention combines errorless learning and structured cue fading to help second grade students improve their understanding of symbolic magnitude. Results indicate that students who learned about symbolic magnitude using the novel intervention did better than students who were provided with extensive declarative support. These findings offer preliminary evidence in favor of using learning combination of errorless learning and cue fading techniques in the mathematics classroom.

Unique Mechanisms for the Availability of Declarative Memory Elements and the Strengthening of Cognitive Operations.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of memory for prior cognitive operations and availability of declarative memory elements in long-term semantic priming. The impetus for this investigation was the role of working memory (WM) in complex cognitive processing. Empirical estimates of WM are too limited to explain complex cognitive processes. Therefore, contemporary models of WM propose access to long-term memory (LTM) to expand these limits. The priming literature provides one theoretical mechanism for access to LTM: long-term semantic priming. However, explanations for long-term semantic priming include both increased availability of LTM elements and the facilitation of prior cognitive operations. Our goal was to examine if the facilitation of prior cognitive operations is dependent on the availability of previously encountered LTM elements. A task used in previous research proposed to capture the facilitation of cognitive operations coupled with a directed forgetting manipulation was used to examine this relationship. Three experiments were conducted to that end. All experiments resulted in facilitation of the procedure of categorization. Experiments 1 and 2 additionally found relatively poor recognition for items that participants were told to forget despite the fact that categorization was facilitated for related items. Experiment 3 resulted in similarly poor recognition for category names that participants were told to forget. Taken together, the experiments in this investigation demonstrate a clear separation between the cognitive operations and declarative elements of the categorization task. Namely, the continued availability of declarative elements is not necessary for the subsequent facilitation of categorization operations.

Why does interleaving improve math learning? The contributions of discriminative contrast and distributed practice.

Interleaved practice involves studying exemplars from different categories in a non-systematic, pseudorandom order under the constraint that no two exemplars from the same category are presented consecutively. Interleaved practice of materials has been shown to enhance test performance compared to blocked practice in which exemplars from the same category are studied together. Why does interleaved practice produce this benefit? We evaluated two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses, the discriminative-contrast hypothesis and the distributed-practice hypothesis, by testing participants' performance on calculating the volume of three-dimensional geometric shapes. In Experiment 1, participants repeatedly practiced calculating the volume of four different-sized shapes according to blocked practice, interleaved practice, or remote-interleaved practice (which involved alternating the practice of volume calculation with non-volume problems, like permutations and fraction addition). Standard interleaving enhanced performance compared to blocked practice but did not produce enhanced performance compared to remote interleaving. In Experiment 2, we replicated this pattern and extended the results to include a remote-blocked group, which involved blocking volume calculation with non-volume problems. Performance on key measures was better for remote-interleaved groups compared to remote-blocked groups, a finding that supports the distributed-practice hypothesis.

Memory processes underlying long-term semantic priming.

Two decades of research in semantic priming has provided substantial evidence for a distinction between short- and long-term semantic priming effects. Early models of cognition suggested a single mechanism to explain priming at short and long lags. Later models refuted this explanation and proposed that different mechanisms are necessary to account for different durations of priming effects. Two alternative explanations of long-term semantic priming effects have been proposed in the extant literature. The first explanation is that long-term semantic priming effects rely upon the incremental strengthening of abstract semantic memory representations. The second explanation is that long-term priming is the result of memory for prior cognitive operations. In two experiments, we used different semantic content - word meaning versus category membership - to investigate the mechanisms accountable for long-term semantic priming. Evidence from the two experiments suggests that long-term semantic priming effects are due to different memory processes for different semantic content. Long-term semantic priming of word meanings was dependent on strengthening abstract semantic memory representations and persistent priming of category membership was dependent on memory for prior cognitive operations.

Do complex span and content-embedded working memory tasks predict unique variance in inductive reasoning?

Complex span and content-embedded tasks are two kinds of tasks that are designed to measure maintenance and processing in the working memory system. However, a key functional difference between these task types is that complex span tasks require the maintenance of information that is not relevant to the processing task, whereas content-embedded tasks require the maintenance of task-relevant information. The purpose of the present research was to test the hypothesis that more unique variance in inductive reasoning would be explained by content-embedded tasks than by complex span tasks, given that inductive reasoning requires reasoners to maintain and manipulate task-relevant information in order to arrive to a solution. A total of 384 participants completed three complex span tasks, three content-embedded tasks, and three inductive reasoning tasks. The primary structural equation model explained 51% of the variance in inductive reasoning; 45% of the variance in inductive reasoning was uniquely predicted by the content-embedded latent factor, 6% of the variance was predicted by shared variance between the content-embedded and complex span latent factors, and less than 1% was uniquely predicted by the complex span latent factor. These outcomes provide a novel extension to the small but growing literature showing an advantage of using content-embedded rather than complex span tasks for predicting higher-level cognition.

Why Is Working Memory Performance Unstable? A Review of 21 Factors.

In this paper, we systematically reviewed twenty-one factors that have been shown to either vary with or influence performance on working memory (WM) tasks. Specifically, we review previous work on the influence of intelligence, gender, age, personality, mental illnesses/medical conditions, dieting, craving, stress/anxiety, emotion/motivation, stereotype threat, temperature, mindfulness training, practice, bilingualism, musical training, altitude/hypoxia, sleep, exercise, diet, psychoactive substances, and brain stimulation on WM performance. In addition to a review of the literature, we suggest several frameworks for classifying these factors, identify shared mechanisms between several variables, and suggest areas requiring further investigation. This review critically examines the breadth of research investigating WM while synthesizing the results across related subfields in psychology.

Discrimination in measures of knowledge monitoring accuracy.

Knowledge monitoring predicts academic outcomes in many contexts. However, measures of knowledge monitoring accuracy are often incomplete. In the current study, a measure of students' ability to discriminate known from unknown information as a component of knowledge monitoring was considered. Undergraduate students' knowledge monitoring accuracy was assessed and used to predict final exam scores in a specific course. It was found that gamma, a measure commonly used as the measure of knowledge monitoring accuracy, accounted for a small, but significant amount of variance in academic performance whereas the discrimination and bias indexes combined to account for a greater amount of variance in academic performance.

A procedural approach to remembering personal identification numbers among older adults.

This study investigated whether a motor skill learning intervention could provide better memory for personal identification numbers (PINs) as compared to a control group. Younger (ages 18 to 40) and older (ages 61 to 92) participants were randomly assigned to conditions. All participants received three days of training consisting of 12 blocks of 12 trials each. Participants were tested immediately after training, after four days, and after seven days. Dependent measures were errors, latencies, and number of correct responses per minute. Younger participants were less error prone, faster, and produced more correct responses than older participants. Training condition (motor skill-based versus control training) had no significant effect on any of the dependent variables. Testing time had a significant effect on latency, and the effect of testing time on latency interacted with age group. In a second study, six older individuals diagnosed as having mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were trained using the motor skill learning intervention. Their performance was compared with that of the younger and older motor skill groups from the first experiment. The results showed that the older MCI group was significantly slower, more error prone, and produced fewer correct responses per minute than the older, normal group. Thus the presence of diagnosed MCI significantly impairs memory for PINs beyond the impairment expected from normal aging.

Habitual reading biases in the allocation of study time.

Item order can bias learners' study decisions and undermine the use of more effective allocation strategies, such as allocating study time to items in one's region of proximal learning. In two experiments, we evaluated whether the influence of item order on study decisions reflects habitual responding based on a reading bias. We manipulated the order in which relatively easy, moderately difficult, and difficult items were presented from left to right on a computer screen and examined selection preference as a function of item order and item difficulty. Experiment 1a was conducted with native Arabic readers and in Arabic, and Experiment 1b was conducted with native English readers and in English. Students from both cultures prioritized items for study in the reading order of their native language: Arabic readers selected items for study in a right-to-left fashion, whereas English readers largely selected items from left to right. In Experiment 2, native English readers completed the same task as participants in Experiment 1b, but for some participants, lines of text were rotated upside down to encourage them to read from right to left. Participants who read upside-down text were more likely to first select items on the right side of an array than were participants who studied right-side-up text. These results indicate that reading habits can bias learners' study decisions and can undermine agenda-based regulation.

Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension.

Discourse comprehension requires one to process information that is actively maintained in working memory (WM). Therefore, we hypothesized that individual differences in comprehension would be predicted better by working memory tasks that capture the concurrent demands of processing and maintenance of the same memory elements (i.e., content-embedded tasks) than by WM tasks that require the maintenance of an extraneous memory load during processing (e.g., complex span tasks). Two hundred sixty-one undergraduates completed three content-embedded tasks, three complex span tasks, and three measures of comprehension. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that the content-embedded tasks accounted for a greater amount of variance in comprehension than did complex span tasks. Thus, tasks that require one to coordinate the processing and maintenance of task-specific memory elements are preferable for capturing the relationship between WM and comprehension.

The persistence of content-specific memory operations: priming effects following a 24-h delay.

The duration of long-term semantic priming is typically described in minutes. Woltz and Was (2007) found that priming effects following processing in working memory were relatively long-lasting, reporting there was no decrease in priming effects following 32 intervening Stroop-like trials. These findings were interpreted as an increased availability of long-term memory elements, in part due to memory for prior operations, and as not being solely explicable by spreading-of-activation accounts of priming. The present study was designed to test the persistence of these effects following a 24-h delay. In the present study, priming effects were found to be present following a minimum of a 24-h delay between processing of information in working memory and measures of increased availability of long-term memory elements. The results are discussed, in the context of long-term semantic priming, as being the result of persistent memory for prior cognitive operations.

Further evidence that not all executive functions are equal.

The current study presents a comparison of 2 structural equation models describing the relationship between the executive functions of updating and inhibiting. Although it has been argued that working memory capacity is defined by one's ability to control the focus of attention, the findings of the current study support a view of the executive control of attention that reflects updating and inhibiting as not entirely dependent on the same resources.