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Preregistration of analyses related to HCPs’ attitudes to Covid-19 mandates (JITSUVAX WP1)

Preregistration of a data collection related to a study on vaccine confidence among healthcare professionals. Five countries participate in the study: France, UK, Germany, Portugal, and Finland. The present preregistration concerns the data collection carried out in Finland.

This is a pre-registration of the hypotheses and method prior to data collection.

Käsikirjan aiheita ovat väestön käyttäytyminen ja asenteet, rokotekäytännöt, faktat ja väärä tieto. Oppaan tavoitteena on antaa käytännön vinkkejä ja tarjota ajantasaista tietoa ja näyttöä, jotta rokotteista voidaan puhua luotettavasti, vähentää niihin liittyvää pelkoa ja torjua rakentavasti niihin liittyviä myyttejä.

Studies have indicated that video gaming is positively associated with cognitive performance in select cognitive domains, but the magnitudes of these associations have been called into question, as they have frequently been based on extreme groups analyses that have compared video gamers with non-gamers. When including the whole range of participants, and not just extreme cases, these effects were observed to reduce markedly (Unsworth et al., 2015). To further study this issue, we compared the associations between video gaming and aspects of working memory (WM) performance in an extreme groups design to those of a design that includes the full range of participants in a large adult sample (n = 503). WM was measured with three composite scores (verbal WM, visuospatial WM, n-back). The extreme groups analyses showed that video gamers performed better than non-gamers on all three WM measures, while the whole sample analyses indicated weak positive associations between the time spent playing video games and visuospatial WM and n-back performance. Thus, study design modulated the effects, but two of the three associations between WM and video gaming were consistent across both analysis techniques. A separate study confirmed that our questionnaire-based estimate of gaming hours was reliable when compared with one-week diaries of videogame playing. While the present cross-sectional results preclude causal inferences, possible mechanisms of WM - videogame playing associations and future research directions are discussed. Overall, our results indicate that cognition - videogame playing relationships, albeit weak, are not solely due to recently discussed methodological artefacts concerning the particular analytical approach and survey reliability.

Due to enduring experience of managing two languages, bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared to monolinguals. Despite extensive investigation, there is, however, no consensus regarding the existence of such a bilingual advantage. Here we synthesized comparisons of bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ performance in six executive domains using 891 effect sizes from 152 studies on adults. We also included unpublished data, and considered the potential influence of a number of study-, task-, and participant-related variables. Before correcting estimates for observed publication bias, our analyses revealed a very small bilingual advantage for inhibition, shifting, and working memory, but not for monitoring or attention. No evidence for a bilingual advantage remained after correcting for bias. For verbal fluency, our analyses indicated a small bilingual disadvantage, possibly reflecting less exposure for each individual language when using two languages in a balanced manner. Moreover, moderator analyses did not support theoretical presuppositions concerning the bilingual advantage. We conclude that the available evidence does not provide systematic support for the widely held notion that bilingualism is associated with benefits in cognitive control functions in adults.

Additional file 1. Questionnaire in English

Additional file 1. Questionnaire in English