Job search as goal-directed behavior: Objectives and methods

This study investigated the relationship between job search objectives (finding a new job/turnover, staying aware of job alternatives, developing a professional network, and obtaining leverage against an employer) and job search methods (looking at job ads, visiting job sites, networking, contacting employment agencies, contacting employers, and submitting applications). In a sample of 205 employed individuals from Belgium and Romania, job search objectives were significantly related to job search methods even after job satisfaction was controlled. Furthermore, particular objectives predicted specific methods. While the finding a new job/turnover objective predicted all search methods, staying aware of alternatives predicted using job ads and sites; the network objective predicted networking and contacting employers; and the leverage objective predicted contacting employers. Results suggest that search objectives are important for understanding job seekers’ search behavior and support the view that job search is a self-regulatory process that begins with objectives which activate search behavior.     

A test for children's goal-directed behavior: a pilot study

A test for children's goal-directed behavior was developed, based on neuropsychological executive function research of Vilkki and Holst and on the framework of Lewin's level-of-aspiration research. 46 12-yr.-old children were participants. Fluid Intelligence was expected to be linked to goal-directed behavior and a commonly used executive function task, the Wisconsin Card-sorting Test. A child was asked to set personal goals in a short-term memory task without prior knowledge about performance. Four different task versions were developed employing both verbal (memorizing series of words) and visuospatial (memorizing block sequences) material. The child set an individual goal for each memory trial. Goal-setting after successful and failed trials was investigated. Usually, the children lowered their goals after failures and set their goals higher or did not change them after successful trials. Compared to goal on a previous trial, Inadequate Responses included setting a goal higher after a failed trial and setting it lower after success. Fluid Intelligence was related to goal-directed behavior, viz., Inadequate Responses. It also correlated with scores on the Wisconsin Card-sorting Test. The results are in concordance with previous research. In addition to experimental executive function research, the novel test might be useful in research concerning children's motivation, self-efficacy, and self-regulated learning.     

Familiarity and person construal: Individuating knowledge moderates the automaticity of category activation

In this experiment, we examined how perceivers' familiarity with targets moderates person construal. Based on evidence from object categorization that level of construal varies with expertise in a manner that maximizes cue validity, we reasoned that although social (i.e., group‐level) categorization is functional for construing unfamiliar others (about whom little or no individuating information is available), it is less functional for familiar others (about whom a great deal of individuating information is available). Results from an automatic priming paradigm provided evidence for our reasoning: Participants categorized unfamiliar faces according to the most salient categorical dimension available in the visual information (in this case, sex), but did not do so for familiar faces. Implications for models of person perception are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition

Humans have a highly developed visual system, yet we spend a high proportion of our time awake ignoring the visual world and attending to our own thoughts. The present study examined eye movement characteristics of goal-directed internally focused cognition. Deliberate internally focused cognition was induced by an idea generation task. A letter-by-letter reading task served as external task. Idea generation (vs. reading) was associated with more and longer blinks and fewer microsaccades indicating an attenuation of visual input. Idea generation was further associated with more and shorter fixations, more saccades and saccades with higher amplitudes as well as heightened stimulus-independent variation of eye vergence. The latter results suggest a coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information and associated cognitive processes, i.e. searching for ideas. Our results support eye behavior patterns as indicators of goal-directed internally focused cognition through mechanisms of attenuation of visual input and coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information.     

The role of goal-directed behavior in intention attribution in children

In this study, we addressed the question of the nature of the information needed by 13-month-old infants to understand another agent's intentions. In two experiments, an experimenter was either unable or unwilling to give a toy to an infant. Importantly, an implement (a gutter in which the toy could roll down toward the infant) was used to make the experimenter's behavior as similar as possible in the two conditions. When the experimenter remained still in both conditions, infants did not behave differently according to the experimenter's intentions, suggesting that they did not infer them. By contrast, in a second experiment, where the experimenter performed an action directed toward the gutter in both conditions, the infants looked away from the experimental setting more often and longer in the unwilling condition than in the unable condition. They also looked more toward the experimenter in the unable condition than in the unwilling condition. Therefore, we conclude that an agent's intentional attitude can already be inferred by a 13-month-old provided that this intention is concretely shown through a goal-directed action.     

Pavlovian influences on goal-directed behavior in mice: the role of cue-reinforcer relations

Two experiments refined procedures to study Pavlovian influences on goal-directed behavior in mice and studied the effects of CS-US relations in Pavlovian-instrumental interactions. Independent groups of mice underwent Pavlovian training to associate either a 10-sec or 2-min auditory stimulus (CS) with reward. We next assessed the ability of the response-contingent CS presentations to reinforce novel instrumental responding (conditioned reinforcement; CRf) or the ability of noncontingent CS presentations to increase ongoing instrumental responding (Pavlovian-instrumental transfer; PIT). Whereas 10-sec training conditions produced strong CRf (and no PIT), 2-min training conditions produced robust PIT (but no CRf).     

At the boundaries of automaticity: negation as reflective operation

The present research investigated whether automatic social-cognitive skills are based on the same representations and processes as their controlled counterparts. Using the cognitive task of negating valence, the authors demonstrate that enhanced practice in negating the valence of a stimulus can lead to changes in the underlying associative representation. However, procedural, rule-based components of negations were generally unaffected by practice (Experiments 1-3). Moreover, negations of evaluative stimuli did not influence automatic evaluative responses to these stimuli, unless the negation was included in the associative representation of a stimulus (Experiments 4-6). These results suggest that some practice-related skill improvements are limited to conditions in which a general procedure can be substituted by the retrieval of results of previous applications from associative memory. Implications for research on automaticity and social cognition are discussed.     

"Instant success": turning temptations into cues for goal-directed behavior

Contrary to lay intuition, counteractive control theory posits that tempting food cues can help individuals to act in accordance with their long-term dieting goal. However, studies have shown that temptations trigger goal-directed behavior only in successful but not in unsuccessful self-regulators. The aim of the present study was to test whether it is possible to create facilitated temptation-goal associations in unsuccessful dieters using implementation intentions (e.g., "If I see or smell chocolate then I will follow my goal to diet") and whether this indeed stimulates more successful self-regulation. It was found that implementation intentions linking a temptation to a dieting goal lead to self-perceived improved resistance to (Study 1) as well as reduced consumption (Study 2) of tempting snacks compared to a control condition. Moreover, Study 2 revealed that the reduced snack consumption was indeed related to facilitated temptation-goal associations in participants who had formed implementation intentions.     

The temporal structure of goal-directed and habitual operant behavior

Operant behavior can reflect the influence of goal-directed and habitual processes. These can be distinguished by changes to response rate following devaluation of the reinforcing outcome. Whether a response is goal directed or habitual depends on whether devaluation affects response rate. Response rate can be decomposed into frequencies of bouts and pauses by analyzing the distribution of interresponse times. This study sought to characterize goal-directed and habitual behaviors in terms of bout-initiation rate, within-bout response rate, bout length, and bout duration. Data were taken from three published studies that compared sensitivity to devaluation following brief and extended training with variable-interval schedules. Analyses focused on goal-directed and habitual responding, a comparison of a habitual response to a similarly trained response that had been converted back to goal-directed status after a surprising event, and a demonstration of contextual control of habit and goal direction in the same subjects. Across experiments and despite responses being clearly distinguished as goal directed and habitual by total response rate, analyses of bout-initiation rate, within-bout rate, bout length, and bout duration did not reveal a pattern that distinguished goal-directed from habitual responding.     

Exploring automaticity in text processing: syntactic ambiguity as a test case

A prevalent assumption in text comprehension research is that many aspects of text processing are automatic, with automaticity typically defined in terms of properties (e.g., speed and effort). The present research advocates conceptualization of automaticity in terms of underlying mechanisms and evaluates two such accounts, a computational-efficiency account (underlying computational processes become more efficient with practice) and a memory-based processing account (the underlying basis of processing shifts with practice, from computing interpretations to retrieving prior interpretations). In five experiments, short texts containing either an ambiguous or unambiguous syntactic structure were presented for multiple study trials. In both conditions, reading times in target regions decreased across trials, indicating automatization. Several findings supported the memory-based processing account (e.g., practice effects were largely item-specific, reading times were longer for ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences on early trials but converged on later trials) Some evidence was also found for a contribution of gains in computational efficiency (i.e., some item-general practice effects were observed). Implications for research on automaticity and text processing are discussed.     

Prediction of goal-directed behavior: Attitudes,intentions, and perceived behavioral control

A proposed theory of planned behavior, an extension of Ajzen and Fishbein's (1980, Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior. Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall) theory of reasoned action, was tested in two experiments. The extended theory incorporates perceived control over behavioral achievement as a determinant of intention (Version 1) as well as behavior (Version 2). In Experiment 1, college students' attendance of class lectures was recorded over a 6-week period; in Experiment 2, the behavioral goal was getting an “A” in a course. Attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and intentions were assessed halfway through the period of observation in the first experiment, and at two points in time in the second experiment. The results were evaluated by means of hierarchical regression analyses. As expected, the theory of planned behavior permitted more accurate prediction of intentions and goal attainment than did the theory of reasoned action. In both experiments, perceived behavioral control added significantly to the prediction of intentions. Its contribution to the prediction of behavior was significant in the second wave of Experiment 2, at which time the students' perceptions of behavioral control had become quite accurate. Contrary to expectations, there was little evidence for interactions between perceived behavioral control and the theory's other independent variables.     

Prediction of goal-directed behavior: attitude, subjective behavioral competence and emotions]

Ajzen's (1985) theory of planned behavior explaining and predicting goal-directed behavior is extended by an emotional component. The extended theory of planned behavior is tested experimentally. N = 64 subjects play with two video games (a speed- and a problem-oriented game) under an achievement-motivational orientation. One half of the subjects plays both games in an easy version, the other half in a difficult version. The verbal emotional reactions to playing video games are grouped factor-analytically into an "activity emotion" and a "security emotion". Subjects playing video games in the difficult condition feel significantly more insecure, and perceive their behavioral control as significantly lower than subjects playing in the easy condition. Tests of the extended theory of planned behavior lead to significant squared multiple correlations for the dependent variables within the range of R2 = .20 to .58. The activity emotion accounts predominantly for a significant part of the variance of the attitude and the security emotion accounts for a significant part of the variance of the perceived behavioral control. No predictive power was found for the intention to play the games successfully.     

Voluntary task switching under load: Contribution of top-down and bottom-up factors in goal-directed behavior

The present study investigated the relative contribution of bottom-up and top-down control to task selection in the voluntary task-switching (VTS) procedure. In order to manipulate the efficiency of top-down control, a concurrent working memory load was imposed during VTS. In three experiments, bottom-up factors, such as stimulus repetitions, repetition of irrelevant information, and stimulus-task associations, were introduced in order to investigate their influence on task selection. We observed that the tendency to repeat tasks was stronger under load, suggesting that top-down control counteracts the automatic tendency to repeat tasks. The results also indicated that task selection can be guided by several elements in the environment, but that only the influence of stimulus repetitions depends on the efficiency of top-down control. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed within the interplay between top-down and bottom-up control that underlies the voluntary selection of tasks.     

Set-shifting as a component process of goal-directed problem-solving

In two experiments, we compared secondary task interference on Tower of London performance resulting from three different secondary tasks. The secondary tasks were designed to tap three different executive functions, namely set-shifting, memory monitoring and updating, and response inhibition. Previous work using individual differences methodology suggests that, all other things being equal, the response inhibition or memory tasks should result in the greatest interference. However, this was not found to be the case. Rather, in both experiments the set-shifting task resulted in significantly more interference on Tower of London performance than either of the other secondary tasks. Subsequent analyses suggest that the degree of interference could not be attributed to differences in secondary task difficulty. Results are interpreted in the light of related work which suggests that solving problems with non-transparent goal/subgoal structure requires flexible shifting between subgoals—a process that is held to be impaired by concurrent performance of a set-shifting task.     

Improving computer skill training: behavior modeling, symbolic mental rehearsal, and the role of knowledge structures

Effective computer skill training is vital to organizational productivity. Two experiments (N = 288) demonstrated that the behavior modeling approach to computer skill training could be substantially improved by incorporating symbolic mental rehearsal (SMR). SMR is a specific form of mental rehearsal that establishes a cognitive link between visual images and symbolic memory codes. As theorized, the significant effects of SMR on declarative knowledge and task performance were shown to be fully mediated by changes in trainees' knowledge structures. The mediational role of knowledge structures is expected to generalize to other training interventions and cognitive skill domains. Our findings have the immediate implications that practitioners should use SMR for improving the effectiveness of computer skill training.