Individual differences in ethics positions: The EPQ-5.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: O'Boyle EH
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8216522 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:As research teams are increasingly comprised of members from multiple disciplines, ranging from the physical sciences, life sciences, social and behavioral sciences to the arts and humanities, it is important to revisit how research is conducted at several levels. Coupled with the national concern over rigor and reproducibility in research, it is therefore crucial to ensure that all members of such multidisciplinary teams view the need for ethics in the conduct of research in similar ways. Towards this end, Wayne State University developed a course in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) which was mandatory for all its 1500 doctoral students across all disciplines in its 75 PhD programs. We found that student perceptions of the validity, applicability and usefulness of the course varied by discipline. This was in spite of iterative changes made to the course by faculty in those disciplines to make the content palatable to all. The findings show that more work needs to be done to fully incorporate the needs of social sciences and humanities disciplines in a comprehensive university course. This is especially important as these students become members of large multidisciplinary research teams in order to uphold the highest levels of rigor, reproducibility and ethics.
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Project description:BackgroundProfile-based analysis of multiple sequence alignments (MSA) allows for accurate comparison of protein families. Here, we address the problems of detecting statistically confident dissimilarities between (1) MSA position and a set of predicted residue frequencies, and (2) between two MSA positions. These problems are important for (i) evaluation and optimization of methods predicting residue occurrence at protein positions; (ii) detection of potentially misaligned regions in automatically produced alignments and their further refinement; and (iii) detection of sites that determine functional or structural specificity in two related families.ResultsFor problems (1) and (2), we propose analytical estimates of P-value and apply them to the detection of significant positional dissimilarities in various experimental situations. (a) We compare structure-based predictions of residue propensities at a protein position to the actual residue frequencies in the MSA of homologs. (b) We evaluate our method by the ability to detect erroneous position matches produced by an automatic sequence aligner. (c) We compare MSA positions that correspond to residues aligned by automatic structure aligners. (d) We compare MSA positions that are aligned by high-quality manual superposition of structures. Detected dissimilarities reveal shortcomings of the automatic methods for residue frequency prediction and alignment construction. For the high-quality structural alignments, the dissimilarities suggest sites of potential functional or structural importance.ConclusionThe proposed computational method is of significant potential value for the analysis of protein families.
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Project description:There is substantial evidence for individual differences in personality and cognitive abilities, but we lack clear intuitions about individual differences in visual abilities. Previous work on this topic has typically compared performance with only 2 categories, each measured with only 1 task. This approach is insufficient for demonstration of domain-general effects. Most previous work has used familiar object categories, for which experience may vary between participants and categories, thereby reducing correlations that would stem from a common factor. In Study 1, we adopted a latent variable approach to test for the first time whether there is a domain-general object recognition ability, o. We assessed whether shared variance between latent factors representing performance for each of 5 novel object categories could be accounted for by a single higher-order factor. On average, 89% of the variance of lower-order factors denoting performance on novel object categories could be accounted for by a higher-order factor, providing strong evidence for o. Moreover, o also accounted for a moderate proportion of variance in tests of familiar object recognition. In Study 2, we assessed whether the strong association across categories in object recognition is due to third-variable influences. We find that o has weak to moderate associations with a host of cognitive, perceptual, and personality constructs and that a clear majority of the variance in and covariance between performance on different categories is independent of fluid intelligence. This work provides the first demonstration of a reliable, specific, and domain-general object recognition ability, and suggest a rich framework for future work in this area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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