Publications

BACKGROUND: Enabling women with breast cancer to actively participate in their care requires a better understanding of the interplay between contextual factors and mediators. This research explored the determinants of supportive care experiences for women living with breast cancer in rural communities of British Columbia.

METHODS: The study used a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional design. A survey regarding demographic, health, decision support, and breast cancer supportive care experiences was administered to 100 participants.

RESULTS: The combination of being less than 40 years old, having an undergraduate education, and being three to five years post-diagnosis is associated with higher (more positive) total survey scores. A linear combination of undergraduate school and health problems post-treatment showed higher medical treatment scores, with R2 = 23%.

CONCLUSION: The findings emphasize the growing need for psychosocial and emotional supportive care for cancer survivors. The results highlight the potential benefits of informed decision-support tools to fortify supportive care, emphasizing the need to facilitate better supportive care services for women battling breast cancer.

RECOMMENDATION: Supportive care plays a crucial role in guiding individuals' experiences with cancer through the healthcare system. Increasing supportive care centres, especially in rural areas, could improve patient-reported outcomes, and experiences, and ensure timely access to care.

Vision can be viewed as a continuous information processing, yet its underlying system properties have not been fully understood. Studies of visual serial dependence suggest that current perception is often biased by the preceding stimuli, raising the possibility of Markov-like processing-where only the previous state (not the ones before) affects the current one. In the current study, participants rated faces on two of three traits (attractiveness, trustworthiness, and dominance), presented in randomized sequences so each rating could be preceded by the same or a different trait. This design allowed us to examine how prior input (the face) and prior output (the perception) influence current judgment. Using derivative of Gaussian, Markov chain, and linear mixed-effects modeling, we found that serial dependence was disrupted-and both memoryless property and Markov assumptions were violated-when alternating between two traits for attractiveness and dominance but not under other conditions. These findings suggest that different facets of (presumably) the same visual computation can exhibit asymmetrical system properties. More broadly, our work shows how serial dependence can serve as a powerful tool to probe the underlying rules by which the visual system integrates past and present information.

The human visual system prioritizes dynamic stimuli, which attract attention and more readily break suppression to reach perceptual awareness. Here, we investigated whether dynamic changes in contrast-either increasing or decreasing-are equally effective in facilitating the breakthrough of suppressed stimuli during binocular rivalry. In Experiment 1a, we found that contrast increases led to significantly faster breakthroughs into perceptual dominance compared with decreases. Notably, increases accelerated breakthrough relative to the unchanged baseline, whereas decreases delayed it. Experiments 1b and 1c replicated the results of Experiment 1a using, respectively, a briefer contrast change (10 ms instead of 100 ms) and partial breakthrough reports, confirming a robust asymmetry in the processing of suppressed stimuli between increases and decreases. In Experiment 2a, random dots moving in different random directions were presented dichoptically, making interocular conflict imperceptible and unreportable. We found that any change in intensity in such rivalry settings-regardless of increase or decrease-promoted perceptual dominance. By introducing motion stimuli into the Experiment 1 paradigm, Experiment 2b demonstrated that the divergence between Experiments 1 and 2 was not due to low-level stimulus differences. Taken together, our results reveal an asymmetric effect of contrast changes during binocular rivalry. This finding highlights the interplay between subliminal sensory processing of contrast changes and conscious awareness, shedding light on developing theoretical models of binocular rivalry.

The physical interactions among objects in the natural environment can cause dramatic changes in their shapes or patterns of motion, and those changes can provide reliable information to distinguish different types of events or materials. The present research was designed to investigate the identification of fluid materials. Observers viewed computer animations and static images of a shiny orange translucent fluid flowing from a tube into a glass jar, and they were asked to make confidence ratings about whether the depicted material looked like water/juice, oil/paint, honey/molasses, or caulk/toothpaste. The results reveal that observers can identify different types of fluid materials within broad overlapping categories based on qualitative characteristics of fluid flow that only occur within limited ranges of viscosity.

PURPOSE: The prevalence of myopia varies significantly across the globe. This may be a consequence of differences in exposure to lifestyle risk factors or differences in genetic susceptibility across ancestry groups. "Trans-ancestry genetic correlation" quantifies the similarity in genetic predisposition to a trait or disease between different populations. We estimated the trans-ancestry genetic correlation of refractive error across Europeans, South Asians, East Asians, and Africans using recently developed approaches.

METHODS: Two methods were applied: (1) trans-ancestry genetic correlation with unbalanced data resources (TAGC-UDR) and (2) trans-ancestry bivariate genomic-relatedness-based restricted maximum-likelihood (TAB-GREML). TAGC-UDR analyses were carried out for UK Biobank participants of European (n = 3500), East Asian (n = 972), South Asian (n = 4303), and African (n = 3877) ancestry. TAB-GREML analyses were carried out for participants of European (n = 10,000), South Asian (n = 4303), and African (n = 3877) ancestry.

RESULTS: TAGC-UDR analyses suggested the trans-ancestry genetic correlation of refractive error was in the range 0.7-1.0 for the European versus African, European versus East Asian, and European versus South Asian ancestry pairs. The TAB-GREML estimates were consistent with the TAGC-UDR findings. Precision of the estimates was limited, reflecting the modest sample sizes of the non-European samples.

CONCLUSIONS: These results support and extend previous work suggesting that genetic susceptibility to refractive error is largely shared across Europeans, Africans, and South Asians. This suggests geographical differences in myopia prevalence are mostly driven by lifestyle factors or rare genetic variants not considered in the current work.