Probability judgment accuracy for general knowledge. Cross-national differences and assessment methods

In this study we compare the probability judgment accuracy of subjects from the United States and Turkey. Three different response modes were employed — numerical probabilities, pie diagrams, and odds. The questions employed in the study were restricted to two-alternative, general-knowledge items. The observed pattern of differences in the components of probability judgment accuracy paralleled those of studies that have compared Western and Asian subjects. In particular, Turkish subjects exhibited better discrimination but worse calibration than their US counterparts. This result persisted across all three response modes. These findings lend support to previous assertions that observed cross-national differences arise from socioeconomic rather than Asian versus Western cultural differences. However, the consistency of the observed differences across response modes refutes a previous assertion that observed cultural differences are merely the result of response bias.     

What results when firms implement practices: the differential relationship between specific practices, firm financial performance, customer service, and quality

Previous research on organizational practices is replete with contradictory evidence regarding their effects. Here, the authors argue that these contradictory findings may have occurred because researchers have often examined complex practice combinations and have failed to investigate a broad variety of firm-level outcomes. Thus, past research may obscure important differential effects of specific practices on specific firm-level outcomes. Extending this research, the authors develop hypotheses about the effects of practices that (a) enable information sharing, (b) set boundaries, and (c) enable teams on 3 different firm-level outcomes: financial performance, customer service, and quality. Relationships are tested in a sample of observations from over 200 Fortune 1000 firms. Results indicate that information-sharing practices were positively related to financial performance 1 year following implementation of the practices, boundary-setting practices were positively related to firm-level customer service, and team-enabling practices were related to firm-level quality. No single set of practices predicted all 3 firm-level outcomes, indicating practice-specific effects. These findings help resolve the theoretical tension in the literature regarding the effects of organizational practices and offer guidance as to how to best target practices to increase specific work-related outcomes. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

Serving God and Country? Religious Involvement and Military Service Among Young Adult Men

Despite important connections between religion and military action throughout world history, scholars have seldom explored the association between religiosity and military enlistment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we used a person‐oriented analysis to categorize young men according to patterns of adolescent religious involvement. Youth indentified as “highly religious evangelical” are more likely to enlist in the military compared to their “highly religious nonevangelical” and “nonreligious” counterparts; however, these findings hold only for those young men without college experience. These findings are discussed along with study limitations and promising directions for future research.     

Number, But Not Rhythmicity, of Temporal Cues Determines Phrasing Effects in Rat Serial-Pattern Learning

Recent work on experimental manipulations that affect chunking in sequential learning has shown that cues inserted into a sequence, termed “phrasing cues,” can facilitate learning by serving as discriminative cues that overshadow associations between sequence items (Stempowski, Carman, & Fountain, 1999). This experiment assessed whether rhythmicity is an important determinant of temporal phrasing effects or, instead, that a discrimination learning view can adequately account for the results of manipulating the number and sequential positioning of phrasing cues. Rats learned serial patterns in which the number and organization of phrasing cues were manipulated so that phrasing cues were positioned at the beginning of four or eight chunks in an eight-chunk serial pattern. Alternate Chunks phrasing, Aperiodic phrasing (four cues always positioned before the first, third, fourth, and seventh chunks), and Random phrasing (four cues positioned at four chunks chosen randomly for each new pattern presentation) produced equal facilitation of acquisition for cued chunks relative to a No Phrasing condition, but not as much facilitation as Every Chunk phrasing. Cue removal produced deficits, with greater impairment observed for the eight- versus four-cue conditions. Thus, the effects of temporal phrasing cues were predicted less by their rhythmicity than by the common discrimination learning notion that associative strength is a function of the number of stimulus–response pairings.     

Investigating eye movement acquisition and analysis technologies as a causal factor in differential prevalence of crossed and uncrossed fixation disparity during reading and dot scanning

Previous studies examining binocular coordination during reading have reported conflicting results in terms of the nature of disparity (e.g. Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert (Journal of Experimental Psychology General 135:12-35, 2006); Liversedge, White, Findlay, & Rayner (Vision Research 46:2363-2374, 2006). One potential cause of this inconsistency is differences in acquisition devices and associated analysis technologies. We tested this by directly comparing binocular eye movement recordings made using SR Research EyeLink 1000 and the Fourward Technologies Inc. DPI binocular eye-tracking systems. Participants read sentences or scanned horizontal rows of dot strings; for each participant, half the data were recorded with the EyeLink, and the other half with the DPIs. The viewing conditions in both testing laboratories were set to be very similar. Monocular calibrations were used. The majority of fixations recorded using either system were aligned, although data from the EyeLink system showed greater disparity magnitudes. Critically, for unaligned fixations, the data from both systems showed a majority of uncrossed fixations. These results suggest that variability in previous reports of binocular fixation alignment is attributable to the specific viewing conditions associated with a particular experiment (variables such as luminance and viewing distance), rather than acquisition and analysis software and hardware.     

Conscious and nonconscious discrimination of facial expressions

Abrupt discontinuities in recognizing categories of emotion are found for the labelling of consciously perceived facial expressions. This has been taken to imply that, at a conscious level, we perceive facial expressions categorically. We investigated whether the abrupt discontinuities found in categorization for conscious recognition would be replaced by a graded transition for subthreshold stimuli. Fifteen volunteers participated in two experiments, in which participants viewed faces morphed from 100% fear to 100% disgust along seven increments. In Experiment A, target faces were presented for 30 ms, in Experiment B for 170 ms. Participants made two-alternative forced-choice decisions between fear and disgust. Results for the 30 ms presentation time indicated a significant linear trend between degree of morphing and classification of the images. Results for 170 ms presentation time followed the higher order function found in studies of categorical perception. These results provide preliminary evidence for separate processes underlying conscious and nonconscious perception of facial expressions of emotion.     

Using Score Equating and Measurement Invariance to Examine the Flynn Effect in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale

The Flynn effect (FE; i.e., increase in mean IQ scores over time) is commonly viewed as reflecting population shifts in intelligence, despite the fact that most FE studies have not investigated the assumption of score comparability. Consequently, the extent to which these mean differences in IQ scores reflect population shifts in cognitive abilities versus changes in the instruments used to measure these abilities is unclear. In this study, we used modern psychometric tools to examine the FE. First, we equated raw scores for each common subtest to be on the same scale across instruments. This enabled the combination of scores from all three instruments into one of 13 age groups before converting raw scores into Z scores. Second, using age-based standardized scores for standardization samples, we examined measurement invariance across the second (revised), third, and fourth editions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Results indicate that while scores were equivalent across the third and fourth editions, they were not equivalent across the second and third editions. Results suggest that there is some evidence for an increase in intelligence, but also call into question many published FE findings as presuming the instruments' scores are invariant when this assumption is not warranted.