Drawing on the emerging area of workplace sustainability, this study sought to measure the effect... more Drawing on the emerging area of workplace sustainability, this study sought to measure the effects of multimodal physical and cognitive fitness training on sustaining mental health and job readiness via impacts on subjective burnout, mental wellbeing, and resilience in a military cohort. Volunteer participants were block randomised into either a standard 4-week resilient mind program (RMP) intervention or an RMP combined with self-paced functional imagery practice (RMP+FI). Self-reported burnout, mental wellbeing, and resilience were measured at baseline and at the end of the 4-week intervention using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS), Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), and the World Health Organization’s WHO-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5), respectively. A total of 78 participants were enrolled in the study and 72 (92%) completed the program. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed significant effects of the RMP intervention, with both the RMP and RMP+FI groups reporting improved...
The core dimensions of cognitive fitness, such as attention and cognitive control, are emerging t... more The core dimensions of cognitive fitness, such as attention and cognitive control, are emerging through a transdisciplinary expert consensus on what has been termed the Cognitive Fitness Framework (CF2). These dimensions represent key drivers of cognitive performance under pressure across many occupations, from first responders to sport, performing arts and the military. The constructs forming the building blocks of CF2 come from the RDoC framework, an initiative of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) aimed at identifying the cognitive processes underlying normal and abnormal behavior. Similar to physical conditioning, cognitive fitness can be improved with deliberate practice. This paper reports the development of a prototype cognitive fitness training program for competitive athletes and the protocol for its evaluation. The program is focused on primary cognitive capacities and subtending skills for adjusting training rhythms and enhancing readiness for competition. ...
The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including th... more The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport, and depends on a range of cognitive factors. How common these key performance factors are across application domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the performance field in the form of a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie performance under pressure. International experts were recruited from four performance domains (i. Defence; ii. Competitive Sport; iii. Civilian High-stakes; and iv. Performance Neuroscience). Experts rated constructs from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (in addition to several expert-suggested constructs) across successive rounds, until all constructs reached consensus for inclusion or were eliminated. Finally, included constructs were ranked for their relative importance. Sixty-eight experts completed the first Delp...
Supplemental material, PSPB_916631_Corrected_SUPPLEMENT for Meta-Analytic Use of Balanced Identit... more Supplemental material, PSPB_916631_Corrected_SUPPLEMENT for Meta-Analytic Use of Balanced Identity Theory to Validate the Implicit Association Test by Dario Cvencek, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Craig D. Maddox, Brian A. Nosek, Laurie A. Rudman, Thierry Devos, Yarrow Dunham, Andrew S. Baron, Melanie C. Steffens, Kristin Lane, Javier Horcajo, Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Amanda Quinby, Sameer B. Srivastava, Kathleen Schmidt, Eugene Aidman, Emilie Tang, Shelly Farnham, Deborah S. Mellott, Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"I... more This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It's the Deceiver, not the Receiver: No Individual Differences when Detection Deception in a Foreign and a Native Language"
<b>Copyright information:</b>Taken from "Psychological drivers in doping: The li... more <b>Copyright information:</b>Taken from "Psychological drivers in doping: The life-cycle model of performance enhancement"http://www.substanceabusepolicy.com/content/3/1/7Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 2008;3():7-7.Published online 10 Mar 2008PMCID:PMC2315642.
Caffeine is widely used to promote alertness and cognitive performance under challenging conditio... more Caffeine is widely used to promote alertness and cognitive performance under challenging conditions, such as sleep loss. Non-digestive modes of delivery typically reduce variability of its effect. In a placebo-controlled, 50-h total sleep deprivation (TSD) protocol we administered four 200 mg doses of caffeine-infused chewing-gum during night-time circadian trough and monitored participants' drowsiness during task performance with infra-red oculography. In addition to the expected reduction of sleepiness, caffeine was found to disrupt its degrading impact on performance errors in tasks ranging from standard cognitive tests to simulated driving. Real-time drowsiness data showed that caffeine produced only a modest reduction in sleepiness (compared to our placebo group) but substantial performance gains in vigilance and procedural decisions, that were largely independent of the actual alertness dynamics achieved. The magnitude of this disrupting effect was greater for more complex...
This is the data and codebook for the German sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It... more This is the data and codebook for the German sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It's the Deceiver, not the Receiver: No Individual Differences when Detection Deception in a Foreign and a Native Language"
This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"I... more This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It's the Deceiver, not the Receiver: No Individual Differences when Detection Deception in a Foreign and a Native Language"
Modern technologies have enabled the development of dynamic game- and simulation-based assessment... more Modern technologies have enabled the development of dynamic game- and simulation-based assessments to measure psychological constructs. This has highlighted their potential for supplementing other assessment modalities, such as self-report. This study describes the development, design, and preliminary validation of a simulation-based assessment methodology to measure psychological resilience—an important construct for multiple life domains. The design was guided by theories of resilience, and principles of evidence-centered design and stealth assessment. The system analyzed log files from a simulated task to derive individual trajectories in response to stressors. Using slope analyses, these trajectories were indicative of four types of responses to stressors: thriving, recovery, surviving, and succumbing. Using Machine Learning, the trajectories were predictive of self-reported resilience (Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale) with high accuracy, supporting construct validity of the si...
The study continued validating the computerised method of implicit concept map-ping (Aidman & Ega... more The study continued validating the computerised method of implicit concept map-ping (Aidman & Egan, 1998), while extending it from assessing the map’s structural properties to content-based expert evaluation. The on-line concept mapping task (Aid-man & Egan, 1998) was modified to elicit similarity / contrast judgements for a set of basic personality concepts, in a group of 65 introductory psychology students. The re-sulting individual concept proximity matrices were scored for complexity and internal consistency, as well as individually factor- and cluster analysed. Hierarchical cluster tree and un-rotated factorial representations were generated for each individual map. Stu-dents were asked to interpret their own cluster trees and factor plots by naming the clusters and factor axes (a brief statement accompanying the name was allowed). Three independent experts (lecturers in the subject) rated the clarity and accuracy of these interpretations, as well as the soundness of cluster tr...
Physiological research has revealed constructs named "feature detectors" in the human v... more Physiological research has revealed constructs named "feature detectors" in the human visual system. These detectors react to differences in visual features, marking them as salient and thereby attracting the attention of the viewer. In this paper we outline a fuzzy logic system which processes 3D scene descriptions to compute the relative visual importance of regions in the scene. We detail experiments carried out to obtain parameters for the model, and the methodologies used in the aggregation, implication and defuzzification processes. We finish with a discussion of future work for further refinement of the model. The system is expected to have applications in the area of efficient image synthesis, in particular, progressive rendering and transmission techniques.
Sleep deprivation is a major risk factor in transportation, causing driver fatigue and accidents.... more Sleep deprivation is a major risk factor in transportation, causing driver fatigue and accidents. Caffeine is commonly chosen to mitigate this risk but its effects depend on dosage and administration regime. Our study investigated early morning, repeat-dose caffeine administration as a countermeasure against driving performance decline during 50 hours of sleep deprivation. Twentyfour healthy young adults (9 females) aged between 18 to 31 years (M = 22.50, SD = 2.90), with normal sleep-wake patterns, participated in a randomised, double-blind placebo-controlled protocol. They were given either caffeinated chewing gum (200 mg/dose) or placebo gum at 0100h, 0300h, 0500h and 0700h and completed fifteen 40-minute drives in a driving simulator (evenly spaced across the 50-hour protocol). Driving performance was assessed with simulation-derived estimates of speed variability, lane deviation and crash count. The caffeine group drove with significantly lower speed variability (t = -6.44, p &...
This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and eval... more This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and implicit measures of the social–cognitive constructs. The meta-analysis confirmed predictions of BIT’s balance–congruity principle and simultaneously validated interpretation of the IAT’s zero point as indicating absence of preference between two attitude objects. Statistical power afforded by the sample size enabled the first confirmations of balance–congruity predictions with self-report measures. Beyond these empirical results, the meta-analysis introduced a within-study statistical test of the balance–congruity principle, finding that it had greater efficiency than the previous best method. The meta-analysis’s full data set has been pub...
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2015
New field vehicles, soon to be acquired by the Australian Army, will incorporate advanced in-vehi... more New field vehicles, soon to be acquired by the Australian Army, will incorporate advanced in-vehicle information systems whose impact on operator workload and crewing requirements are yet to be examined. Three simulation studies were conducted as an exploration of the impact of existing and potential task demands on field vehicle crew performance. Army participants operated in driver/co-driver crews, performing in-vehicle tasks broadly analogous to those required in real-world field vehicles. Individual and crew performance was assessed under systematically manipulated task demands. Substantial declines in performance with time-on-task were found on simple repetitive vigilance and monitoring tasks, especially under the lowest task demand conditions. Increasing task demands or complexity generally helped mitigate those declines, but with a potential cost to overall performance. The results support effort regulation theory, with evidence of under-mobilization of engagement, effort and...
Drawing on the emerging area of workplace sustainability, this study sought to measure the effect... more Drawing on the emerging area of workplace sustainability, this study sought to measure the effects of multimodal physical and cognitive fitness training on sustaining mental health and job readiness via impacts on subjective burnout, mental wellbeing, and resilience in a military cohort. Volunteer participants were block randomised into either a standard 4-week resilient mind program (RMP) intervention or an RMP combined with self-paced functional imagery practice (RMP+FI). Self-reported burnout, mental wellbeing, and resilience were measured at baseline and at the end of the 4-week intervention using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS), Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), and the World Health Organization’s WHO-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5), respectively. A total of 78 participants were enrolled in the study and 72 (92%) completed the program. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed significant effects of the RMP intervention, with both the RMP and RMP+FI groups reporting improved...
The core dimensions of cognitive fitness, such as attention and cognitive control, are emerging t... more The core dimensions of cognitive fitness, such as attention and cognitive control, are emerging through a transdisciplinary expert consensus on what has been termed the Cognitive Fitness Framework (CF2). These dimensions represent key drivers of cognitive performance under pressure across many occupations, from first responders to sport, performing arts and the military. The constructs forming the building blocks of CF2 come from the RDoC framework, an initiative of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) aimed at identifying the cognitive processes underlying normal and abnormal behavior. Similar to physical conditioning, cognitive fitness can be improved with deliberate practice. This paper reports the development of a prototype cognitive fitness training program for competitive athletes and the protocol for its evaluation. The program is focused on primary cognitive capacities and subtending skills for adjusting training rhythms and enhancing readiness for competition. ...
The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including th... more The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport, and depends on a range of cognitive factors. How common these key performance factors are across application domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the performance field in the form of a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie performance under pressure. International experts were recruited from four performance domains (i. Defence; ii. Competitive Sport; iii. Civilian High-stakes; and iv. Performance Neuroscience). Experts rated constructs from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (in addition to several expert-suggested constructs) across successive rounds, until all constructs reached consensus for inclusion or were eliminated. Finally, included constructs were ranked for their relative importance. Sixty-eight experts completed the first Delp...
Supplemental material, PSPB_916631_Corrected_SUPPLEMENT for Meta-Analytic Use of Balanced Identit... more Supplemental material, PSPB_916631_Corrected_SUPPLEMENT for Meta-Analytic Use of Balanced Identity Theory to Validate the Implicit Association Test by Dario Cvencek, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Craig D. Maddox, Brian A. Nosek, Laurie A. Rudman, Thierry Devos, Yarrow Dunham, Andrew S. Baron, Melanie C. Steffens, Kristin Lane, Javier Horcajo, Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Amanda Quinby, Sameer B. Srivastava, Kathleen Schmidt, Eugene Aidman, Emilie Tang, Shelly Farnham, Deborah S. Mellott, Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"I... more This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It's the Deceiver, not the Receiver: No Individual Differences when Detection Deception in a Foreign and a Native Language"
<b>Copyright information:</b>Taken from "Psychological drivers in doping: The li... more <b>Copyright information:</b>Taken from "Psychological drivers in doping: The life-cycle model of performance enhancement"http://www.substanceabusepolicy.com/content/3/1/7Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 2008;3():7-7.Published online 10 Mar 2008PMCID:PMC2315642.
Caffeine is widely used to promote alertness and cognitive performance under challenging conditio... more Caffeine is widely used to promote alertness and cognitive performance under challenging conditions, such as sleep loss. Non-digestive modes of delivery typically reduce variability of its effect. In a placebo-controlled, 50-h total sleep deprivation (TSD) protocol we administered four 200 mg doses of caffeine-infused chewing-gum during night-time circadian trough and monitored participants' drowsiness during task performance with infra-red oculography. In addition to the expected reduction of sleepiness, caffeine was found to disrupt its degrading impact on performance errors in tasks ranging from standard cognitive tests to simulated driving. Real-time drowsiness data showed that caffeine produced only a modest reduction in sleepiness (compared to our placebo group) but substantial performance gains in vigilance and procedural decisions, that were largely independent of the actual alertness dynamics achieved. The magnitude of this disrupting effect was greater for more complex...
This is the data and codebook for the German sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It... more This is the data and codebook for the German sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It's the Deceiver, not the Receiver: No Individual Differences when Detection Deception in a Foreign and a Native Language"
This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"I... more This is the data and codebook for the Australian sample used for the manuscript:<br>"It's the Deceiver, not the Receiver: No Individual Differences when Detection Deception in a Foreign and a Native Language"
Modern technologies have enabled the development of dynamic game- and simulation-based assessment... more Modern technologies have enabled the development of dynamic game- and simulation-based assessments to measure psychological constructs. This has highlighted their potential for supplementing other assessment modalities, such as self-report. This study describes the development, design, and preliminary validation of a simulation-based assessment methodology to measure psychological resilience—an important construct for multiple life domains. The design was guided by theories of resilience, and principles of evidence-centered design and stealth assessment. The system analyzed log files from a simulated task to derive individual trajectories in response to stressors. Using slope analyses, these trajectories were indicative of four types of responses to stressors: thriving, recovery, surviving, and succumbing. Using Machine Learning, the trajectories were predictive of self-reported resilience (Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale) with high accuracy, supporting construct validity of the si...
The study continued validating the computerised method of implicit concept map-ping (Aidman & Ega... more The study continued validating the computerised method of implicit concept map-ping (Aidman & Egan, 1998), while extending it from assessing the map’s structural properties to content-based expert evaluation. The on-line concept mapping task (Aid-man & Egan, 1998) was modified to elicit similarity / contrast judgements for a set of basic personality concepts, in a group of 65 introductory psychology students. The re-sulting individual concept proximity matrices were scored for complexity and internal consistency, as well as individually factor- and cluster analysed. Hierarchical cluster tree and un-rotated factorial representations were generated for each individual map. Stu-dents were asked to interpret their own cluster trees and factor plots by naming the clusters and factor axes (a brief statement accompanying the name was allowed). Three independent experts (lecturers in the subject) rated the clarity and accuracy of these interpretations, as well as the soundness of cluster tr...
Physiological research has revealed constructs named "feature detectors" in the human v... more Physiological research has revealed constructs named "feature detectors" in the human visual system. These detectors react to differences in visual features, marking them as salient and thereby attracting the attention of the viewer. In this paper we outline a fuzzy logic system which processes 3D scene descriptions to compute the relative visual importance of regions in the scene. We detail experiments carried out to obtain parameters for the model, and the methodologies used in the aggregation, implication and defuzzification processes. We finish with a discussion of future work for further refinement of the model. The system is expected to have applications in the area of efficient image synthesis, in particular, progressive rendering and transmission techniques.
Sleep deprivation is a major risk factor in transportation, causing driver fatigue and accidents.... more Sleep deprivation is a major risk factor in transportation, causing driver fatigue and accidents. Caffeine is commonly chosen to mitigate this risk but its effects depend on dosage and administration regime. Our study investigated early morning, repeat-dose caffeine administration as a countermeasure against driving performance decline during 50 hours of sleep deprivation. Twentyfour healthy young adults (9 females) aged between 18 to 31 years (M = 22.50, SD = 2.90), with normal sleep-wake patterns, participated in a randomised, double-blind placebo-controlled protocol. They were given either caffeinated chewing gum (200 mg/dose) or placebo gum at 0100h, 0300h, 0500h and 0700h and completed fifteen 40-minute drives in a driving simulator (evenly spaced across the 50-hour protocol). Driving performance was assessed with simulation-derived estimates of speed variability, lane deviation and crash count. The caffeine group drove with significantly lower speed variability (t = -6.44, p &...
This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and eval... more This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and implicit measures of the social–cognitive constructs. The meta-analysis confirmed predictions of BIT’s balance–congruity principle and simultaneously validated interpretation of the IAT’s zero point as indicating absence of preference between two attitude objects. Statistical power afforded by the sample size enabled the first confirmations of balance–congruity predictions with self-report measures. Beyond these empirical results, the meta-analysis introduced a within-study statistical test of the balance–congruity principle, finding that it had greater efficiency than the previous best method. The meta-analysis’s full data set has been pub...
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2015
New field vehicles, soon to be acquired by the Australian Army, will incorporate advanced in-vehi... more New field vehicles, soon to be acquired by the Australian Army, will incorporate advanced in-vehicle information systems whose impact on operator workload and crewing requirements are yet to be examined. Three simulation studies were conducted as an exploration of the impact of existing and potential task demands on field vehicle crew performance. Army participants operated in driver/co-driver crews, performing in-vehicle tasks broadly analogous to those required in real-world field vehicles. Individual and crew performance was assessed under systematically manipulated task demands. Substantial declines in performance with time-on-task were found on simple repetitive vigilance and monitoring tasks, especially under the lowest task demand conditions. Increasing task demands or complexity generally helped mitigate those declines, but with a potential cost to overall performance. The results support effort regulation theory, with evidence of under-mobilization of engagement, effort and...
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