Subjective assessments of cognition and affect and their relationship with objective performance: Individuals with high levels of cognitive failures or negative affect miss more rare visual targets.

Abstract

The detection of particular targets is critical in applied contexts, such as identifying cancers in diagnostic medical imaging and finding weapons in airport baggage security screening. Missed targets can have dire consequences in such contexts. These contexts are also typically characterized by low prevalence or rare targets such that most searched-through images do not contain targets. A substantive body of evidence demonstrates that humans are much more likely to miss targets when they are rare. Therefore, it is critical to understand the factors that may mitigate or exacerbate this general tendency to miss rare targets. The present study considered the relative role of individual differences in cognitive failures, cognitive empathy, and negative affect (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress) in predicting the detection of rare targets. Across two experiments, there was evidence that individuals experiencing elevated cognitive failures were more likely to miss the rare targets. In Experiment 1, negative affect was also related to performance, but it was only cognitive failures that made a unique contribution to explaining target-present accuracy when they were pitted against one another. There was no evidence that cognitive empathy was linked to performance. These findings have important theoretical implications and also highlight potential avenues for intervention to improve the detection of rare targets.

Predictors and outcomes of nursing students' engagement trajectories at the beginning of their program

“…These dimensions are also known to be highly relevant to their educational success and ability to engage in satisfactory career trajectories. Thus, negative affect has often been related to reduced levels of performance, due in part to its negative impact on students' behavioral, motivational, physical, and/or cognitive functioning (Chin et al, 2017;Goodhew & Edwards, 2022). Likewise, dropout intentions have long been recognized as a direct, and critically important, precursor of a wide variety of undesirable educational outcomes (e.g., actual dropout: Sarrazin et al, 2002;reduced performance: Haque, 2021).…”