Sales Force Compensation Plans Incorporating Multidimensional Sales Effort and Salesperson Efficiency

Sales force compensation models are often constrained by the assumption that salesperson effort is unidimensional. Some models have extended this scenario to multiple products but retain the “single-effort” assumption. In addition, salesperson efficiency has been ignored. As selling is clearly multidimensional, we present a formulation of an agency model (MIPAM) that incorporates multidimensional sales effort as well as salesperson efficiency. Using the model, we also show that under certain assumptions, we can build the second-order condition of the agent’s maximization into the principalagent problem, instead of assuming it, as has been done in the past.     

Diminished joint coordination with aging leads to more variable hand paths

Differences in joint coordination between arms and due to aging were studied in healthy young and older adults reaching to either a fixed, central target or to the same target when it could unexpectedly change location after reach initiation. Joint coordination was investigated by artificially removing the covariation of each joint’s motions with other joints’ motions. Uncontrolled manifold analysis was used to partition joint configuration variance into variance reflecting motor abundance (V_UCM) and variance causing hand path variability (V_ORT). The extent to which V_ORT, related to the consistency of the hand path, increased after removing a joint’s covariation indicated the strength of its coordination with other joints. Young adults exhibited stronger indices of joint coordination, evidenced by a larger increase in V_ORT after removing joint covariation than for older adults. This effect was more striking for the dominant right compared to the left arm for young adults, but not for older adults, especially with target uncertainty. The results indicate that interjoint coordination in young adults leads to less hand path variability compared to older adults.     

Differential reinforcement with and without blocking as treatment for elopement

Blocking is a frequent component of treatments for elopement. Unfortunately, blocking may not always be feasible because elopement often occurs when supervision is low or the behavior cannot be prevented. The present study evaluated the use of blocking in the treatment of elopement by using differential reinforcement of other behavior with and without blocking. In this case, results suggested that blocking may be an essential component for differential reinforcement-based treatments of elopement.     

Prioritizing the Local in an Era of Globalization: A Proposal for Decentering Community Psychology

In this article, I outline a proposal for decentering the field of United States‐based community psychology. Transnational migrations, border crossings, and proliferating neoliberal trade and global media characterize the contemporary moment we live in. These movements challenge any monolithic disciplinary narrative of community psychology. Drawing from liberation psychology and women of Color feminisms, I argue that decentering the field involves engendering more reciprocal, nonhierarchical relations between the core and peripheries of knowledge production. Specifically, I consider the decentering project in two related realms—content and agents of knowledge production. The first issue concerns the kind of research and theorizing we engage in, the issues or topics we investigate, and the subject populations we work with. The second issue pertains to the agents who engage in the aforementioned processes, exercising epistemic power, that is the authority to construct what is considered legitimate and valid knowledge. I conclude with the implications of the decentering project for a multistranded community psychology that is responsive to the cartographies of contemporary struggles.     

The separability of space and time: Dimensional interaction in the memory trace

The speeded-classification paradigm, adapted from the study of perceptual interactions, was used to examine interactions among features of the short-term memory trace. In each of four experiments, a trial began with the presentation of a pair of stimuli, each member of which occurred either first or second in time and above or below a fixation point. One of the two stimuli was then presented again, and the task was to classify its prior temporal (Experiments 1 and 3) or spatial (Experiments 2 and 4) position. The main question of interest asked whether subjects could selectively attend to one of these occurrence dimensions while ignoring irrelevant variation along the other. The results suggested that whereas subjects can selectively ignore temporal or spatial variation when no recall of the irrelevant dimension’s value is required, they suffer interference when values on both dimensions must be remembered. The obtained patterns of interference are consistent withpostperceptual interactions of the-spatial and temporal components of the memory trace.     

A COMPARISON OF BRIEF FUNCTIONAL ANALYSES WITH AND WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES

Variations to traditional functional analysis methodology, such as brief functional analyses (BFAs), are prevalent in the literature. In the current evaluation, two types of BFAs were each conducted with five participants. In one, potential motivating operations (MOs) were presented, and problem behavior resulted in delivery of an associated consequence. In the other, the same MOs were presented, but no consequences were delivered. Results of the two BFAs were compared with respect to the conditions in which problem behavior occurred and the degree of differentiation between test and control conditions. Results across the BFA methodologies generally matched across all five participants. However, greater differentiation was observed in the BFA that did not include consequences. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross-modal compatibility effects with visual-spatial and auditory-verbal stimulus and response sets

Within the visual-spatial and auditory-verbal modalities, reaction times to a stimulus have been shown to be faster if salient features of the stimulus and response sets correspond than if they do not. Accounts that attribute such stimulus-response compatibility effects to general translation processes predict that similar effects should occur for cross-modal stimulus and response sets. To test this prediction, three experiments were conducted examining four-choice reactions with (I) visual spatial-location stimuli assigned to speech responses, (2) speech stimuli assigned to keypress responses, and (3) symbolic visual stimuli assigned to speech responses. In all the experiments, responses were faster when correpondence between salient features of the stimulus and response sets was maintained, demonstrating that similar principles of translation operate both within and across modalities.     

The roles of location specificity and masking mechanisms in the attentional blink

In a series of four experiments using rapid serial visual presentations of two target letters embedded in numeral distractors, with different numbers of display positions and with or without masking, we show that (1) the nonmonotonic, U-shaped attentional blink (AB) function, which occurs when all items are presented at the same display location, is eliminated in favor of a monotonic function when targets and distractors are presented randomly dispersed over four or nine adjacent positions; (2) the AB monotonicity is maintained with the spatially distributed presentation even when backward masks are used in all possible stimulus positions and when the location of the next item in sequence is predictable; and (3) the If-shaped AB is not due to position-specific forward or backward masking effects occurring at early levels of visual processing. We tentatively conclude that the U-shaped AB is primarily a function of the interruption of late visual processing produced when the item following the first target occurs at the same location. In order for the AB to severely disrupt performance, the item following the first target must be presented at the same location as the target so that it can serve both as a distractor and as a mask interrupting or interfering with subsequent visual processing.