Is less more? Yes!

Christopher Fox and colleagues weighed in on this classic question with the help of volunteers (N = 207) from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, Oregon. Museum patrons ranging in age from 6 to 74 were given the opportunity to not just see science but to actually participate in the scientific process! They completed the full-length Berg Card Sorting Testing test, a classic test that measures executive function. The correlation between all 128 trials and the first 64 was quite good for perseverative errors (r = + 0.77) and even better for the categories completed (r = .86) and total errors (r = .87). This study gave evidence that a shortened version of this test (64 cards) may be comparable to the classic, longer version. Thus, giving evidence that "Less is more"!

For further information about this study, see Fox CJ, Mueller ST, Gray HM, Raber J, Piper BJ (2013) Evaluation of a short-form of the Berg Card Sorting Test. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63885. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063885

"I've got to take a leak so bad I can taste it"

Because it is free to use, PEBL gets adopted by many researchers outside the core of psychology.  A new paper just appeared in a Urology Journal called "Need to void and attentional process interrelationships." by a french group, first author Marylène Jousse. They studied how your when you have to 'go', your attention and cognition may be affected.

There is some really cool stuff in this paper.  First, there is apparently a device called an 'Urgeomotor".  And a scale called the  "Urogenital Distress Inventory score".  And a measurement process called "uroflowmetry", a type of Urodynamic testing. And theories about the neural circuitry involved in monitoring and deferring the need to go.

A Situation Awareness and OCD

To commemorate a new paper using the PEBL SATest, (see
Tumkaya, S., Karadag, F., Mueller, S. T., Ugurlu, T. T., Oguzhanoglu, N. K., Ozdel, O., Bayraktutan, M. (2013). Situation awareness in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychiatry Research. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2013.02.009), I decided to write a little background about the test here.

There are two separate worlds of dynamic visual attention and memory research.  One basic research domain studies "Visual Working Memory", whereas in applied domains reserachers study "Situation Awareness".  Although each domain has a distinct focus (VWM tends to move toward understanding neural function, and SA researchers scale up to more complex kinds of awareness),  much work from both camps involves looking and remembering objects on screens.

Milestone 100 PEBL Publications

According to my own detailed searches over the past few years, PEBL has now been cited or used by over 100 articles, theses, and tech reports.  A detailed list, with links, is located at http://pebl.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Publications_citing_PEBL#Theses_and_Technical_Reports

If you have published a paper using PEBL or the PEBL Test battery, please check to see if you are listed.  If not, let us know.  And if you are in the process of publishing, be sure to cite PEBL!

New paper uses PEBL BCST to validate cognitive training

 A new paper out of Japan was just published in PLoS ONE, which attempted to look at whether cognitive training with the 'Brain Age' video game was effective at doing what it claims to do.  It compared training with Brain Age to Tetris.


Apparently, brain- age training impacted just about everything better than the Tetris control.   As can be seen in the table above, errors went down by about 2.4; while Tetris training only improved errors by .4 units.
The paper is available at:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0055518#pone-0055518-t003

Nouchi, R., Taki, Y., Takeuchi, H., Hashizume, H., Nozawa, T., Kambara, T., … Kawashima, R. (2013). Brain Training Game Boosts Executive Functions, Working Memory and Processing Speed in the Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial. PLoS ONE, 8(2), e55518. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0055518

PEBL 0.13 officially released

Version 0.13 of PEBL has officially been released!

Download it here

Some highlights:

Translating a PEBL test

Image from ancientegypt.co.uk

PEBL  tests are used by many non-English speakers. Yet most standardized psychological tests and most of the base tests in the test battery) are created in English.  Because PEBL is open source, if there is a test in English that you want translated/localized, you can do it yourself without too much hassle.  Typically, you only need a text editor (I recommend notepad++). Note that these instructions are not only valid for translators, but they will also work if you want to improve/alter instructions/feedback, labels/headers/etc.  This tutorial is valid for PEBL 0.13 and earlier; we anticipate moving to a slightly easier and more consistent method for PEBL 0.14.
 

The first thing to check is if a translation already exists.  The more popular tests have been translated into a number of languages, and are designed to be easier to translate.

PEBL the World Over

A couple recent publications by PEBL users has lead me to realize the following: PEBL has now been used on every continent, as well as international waters.

New (Old) Memory Test: Ebbinghaus Serial Learning

Hermann Ebbinghaus was the godfather of modern memory research.  His main contribution was formalizing the study of memory by measuring how he learned and forgot lists of nonsense words. He published his studies in an 1885 manuscript, which described his reasoning for making memory a real science by studying nonsense.  <editorial>This lead to nearly a century of studying nonsense under the guise of memory, using memory tasks that were difficult to learn, harder to remember, produced huge amounts of proactive interference because of the nature of the study paradigm, and lead those studying memory down a garden path that they still haven't emerged from </editorial>.

New PEBL Task: Salthouse Connections

The Trail-making tasks such as the one in PEBL have been used for decades as a simple test of mental flexibility in aging.  As I've discussed before, the traditional version in common use (as evidenced by the number of places you can download the paper version on the internet) has some serious problems and confounds, which are addressed in the one available for PEBL.

About a decade ago, Tim Salthouse and colleagues developed and tested [1] a  version based variations introduced by [2]  Oswald and Roth (1978) and also described by [3]Vernon (1993). They called the "connections" test, which avoided some additional confounds found in the original trail-making test.   And unlike the traditional trail-making test where you are timed on how long it takes to complete the test, this test gives you a time limit and sees how many targets you can complete.

PEBL 0.13 New Features: Movie Playback

State Theatre in Ann Arbor, from  flickr user sfgamchic

Thanks to the new waave library, which uses the excellent ffmpeg library,  PEBL 0.13 supports simple playback of many many video and audio formats.

The video and soundfile formats supported are truly enormous
(See list of probably a hundred here)

Sternberg's Memory scanning Test: PEBL Test Battery Test

Saul Sternberg, image from
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~saul/

New in version 0.13 of the PEBL Test Battery is Saul Sternberg's famous memory scanning test (e.g., see Sternberg, S. (1966). High-speed scanning in human memory. Science, 153(3736), 652–654, which has been referenced more than 2000 times)  This task is notable for illustrating how one can probe their short-term memory for letters or numbers, with interesting results regarding how long it takes, with the counter-intuitive results of serial exhaustive search, and also a lesson in advancing the methodology of mental chronometry beyond the subtraction logic to one that uses additive factors.

Iowa (Bechara) Gambling Test Video

The Iowa Gambling Task is a neat measure of decision making. Antoine Bechara identified the key role of the orbital frontal cortex for optimal performance on this short (typically 5-10 minutes) test while at the University of Iowa. The PEBL Iowa test has been used in a few manuscripts recently including one published in Drug & Alcohol Dependence, 117, 204-210.

The video below  includes the instructions, a sample trial, and the output.

New in PEBL 0.13: Automatic list recursion.

When you apply a function to some piece of data, functions will often test to be sure you are giving it the right kind.  For example, many math functions will require that you provide a number, so that the answer is actually valid.  But, with Version 0.13, there is a twist.  If you give any one of a dozen or so math functions a list of numbers, it will return the result of applying that function to all list elements.  And in fact, it will work with a nested list as well.  So:

Print(Ln(3.5) )
Print(Ln([1,3,4,6,6,7,8]))

Produces values:
1.25276
[0, 1.09861, 1.38629, 1.79176, 1.79176, 1.94591, 2.07944]

New in PEBL 0.13: List Access and List Editing

Traditionally, PEBL has used a list as its basis for sets or arrays of data.  This was done because of the flexibility of lists, and other programming languages (LISP and scheme) were built around lists as the primary array format.

Using a list enforces a little bit of discipline in how you create and access data, and provides flexibility that vectors typically cannot offer, but it also has some limitations, especially when one wants to access arbitrary elements or edit particular elements.    However, this is set to change in the next release (0.13).