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Internet-based weight-loss programs appear promising in the short-term but, to date, have not been able to produce the level of weight loss seen in traditional in-person treatment; thus, novel approaches are necessary. Using a combination of interactive technology and in-person support has been beneficial in other areas of medicine. The aim of this study is to compare 12-month weight-loss outcomes of an Internet-only behavioral weight-loss treatment with the same program supplemented with monthly in-person meetings. One hundred and twenty-three participants were randomized to an Internet-only (n = 62) or an Internet + in-person treatment (I+IPS; n = 61). All participants then participated in a 12-month behavioral weight-loss program conducted over the Internet. The groups met online weekly for the first 6 months and biweekly for the second half of the intervention. The I+IPS group had access to the same Web site as the Internet-only group but, once a month, attended an in-person meeting in place of an online chat. Assessments included body weight, program adherence, and social support measures. An intent-to-treat analysis (n = 123) revealed there were no significant Group x Time differences (p = .15) in weight loss at either 6 (-6.8 +/- 7.8 vs. -5.1 +/- 4.8, p = .15) or 12 months (-5.1 +/- 7.1 kg vs. -3.5 +/- 5.1 kg, p = .17, for Internet-only and I+IPS, respectively). Differences between groups for those completing all measures (n = 77) also revealed no significant differences at 6 months (-9.2 +/- 7.0 kg vs. -6.9 +/- 4.2 kg, p = .08) or 12 months (-8.0 +/- 7.5 kg vs. -5.6 +/- 5.5 kg, p = .10 for the Internet-only and I+IPS conditions, respectively). Supplementation of an Internet weight-loss treatment with monthly in-person meetings did not result in greater weight losses over 12 months. Dynamic, socially supportive, and interactive elements of the Web site may have obviated the need for further interpersonal behavioral counseling.

To the Travel Editor: I HAVE followed the series of letters regarding Carolina and Georgia speed traps and in the interest of justice I would like to relate a short tale of another type of arrest enjoyed by my wife and me as we drove north through Rocky Mount, N. C., last August.

In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is affected by whether they are believed to originate from an entity with a mind, capable of having internal states (i.e., mind perception). While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to social-cognitive processes like mind perception, the degree to which activation within this network relates to performance in subsequent social-cognitive tasks remains unclear. In the current study, participants performed a mind perception task (i.e., judging the likelihood that faces, varying in physical human-likeness, have internal states) while event-related fMRI was collected. Afterwards, participants performed a social attention task outside the scanner, during which they were cued by the gaze of the same faces that they previously judged within the mind perception task. Parametric analyses of the fMRI data revealed that activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was related to both mind ratings inside the scanner and gaze-cueing performance outside the scanner. In addition, other social brain regions were related to gaze-cueing performance, including frontal areas like the left insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus, as well as temporal areas like the left temporo-parietal junction and bilateral temporal gyri. The findings suggest that functions subserved by the vmPFC are relevant to both mind perception and social attention, implicating a role of vmPFC in the top-down modulation of low-level social-cognitive processes.

The present study investigated the neural dynamics of error processing in both the time and frequency domains, as well as associated behavioral phenomena, at the single-trial level. We used a technique that enabled us to separately investigate the evoked and induced aspects of the EEG signal (Cohen & Donner, 2013 , Journal of Neurophysiology , 110[12], 2752–2763). We found that at the single-trial level, while the (evoked) error-related negativity (ERN) predicted only post-error slowing (PES)—and only when errors occurred on incongruent trials—induced frontal midline theta power served as a robust predictor of both PES and post-error accuracy (PEA) regardless of stimulus congruency. Mediation models of both electrophysiological indices demonstrated that although the relationship between theta and PEA was mediated by PES, there was not a relationship between the ERN and PEA. Our data suggest that although the ERN and frontal midline theta index functionally related underlying cognitive processes, they are not simply the same process manifested in different domains. In addition, our findings are consistent with the adaptive theory of post-error slowing, as PES was positively associated with post-error accuracy at the single-trial level. More generally, our study provides additional support for the inclusion of a time-frequency approach to better understand the role of medial frontal cortex in action monitoring.

Empirical research demonstrates that when the time following error commission is constrained, subsequent sensory processing can be impaired (Buzzell et al., 2017). This reduction in sensory processing is presumably due to a bottleneck for cognitive resources produced by an overlap between error processing and subsequent stimulus processing. This finding suggests that the system dedicated to improving task performance can actually sometimes be the source of performance failures. Although this finding established that data-limited errors lead to a reduction in sensory processing at short response stimulus intervals (RSIs), it remains unclear if the relationship between error processing and subsequent sensory processing can be modulated by speeded-response errors. In the present study, event-related potentials and behavioral measures were recorded while participants performed a modified version of a Simon task, in which RSI duration was varied. We found that sensory processing, indexed by the P1 component, was reduced following errors at short (200–533 ms), but not long (866–1200 ms), RSIs. Moreover, the magnitude of error processing differentially influenced subsequent sensory processing as a function of RSI. However, whereas prior work demonstrated that the error positivity (Pe) modulated sensory processing on the subsequent trial, only the error-related negativity (ERN) did so within the Simon task. This suggests that although both data-limited errors and speeded-response errors can impact subsequent sensory processing, different stages of error processing appear to mediate this phenomenon.

Economic theory and conventional marketing wisdom suggest many factors that are responsible for variations in advertising and promotion costs among firms and industries. This article tests empirically the explanatory power of several of these factors. The resulting descriptive models are encouragingly consistent across a wide variety of industrial and consumer businesses.

Industrial Marketing

A recent article by Lilien (Lilien, Gary L. 1979. ADVISOR 2: Modeling the marketing mix decision for industrial products. Management Sci. 25 (February) 191–204.) reports the principal findings of the ADVISOR 2 project, in which regression models are used to explain levels of advertising and marketing expenditures by industrial product manufacturers. Lilien compares ADVISOR results with some analyses of PIMS data which we reported in 1976 (Buzzell, Robert D., Paul W. Farris. 1977. Marketing costs in consumer goods industries. Hans Thorelli, ed. Strategy + Structure = Performance . Indiana University Press, 122–145.), and states that \"... the results of the Buzzell-Farris study on the PIMS data and the results of ADVISOR are quite consistent.\" We cannot agree with this conclusion. We believe there are important inconsistencies between the two studies, which should be considered by anyone who might use the ADVISOR model—or the PIMS-based models—to evaluate actual marketing budgets.