Webcam testing: Validation of an innovative open-ended multimedia test

A modern test that takes advantage of the opportunities provided by advancements in computer technology is the multimedia test. The purpose of this study was to investigate the criterion-related validity of a specific open-ended multimedia test, namely a webcam test, by means of a concurrent validity study. In a webcam test a number of work-related situations are presented and participants have to respond as if these were real work situations. The responses are recorded with a webcam. The aim of the webcam test which we investigated is to measure the effectiveness of social work behaviour. This first field study on a webcam test was conducted in an employment agency in The Netherlands. The sample consisted of 188 consultants who participated in a certification process. For the webcam test, good interrater reliabilities and internal consistencies were found. The results showed the webcam test to be significantly correlated with job placement success. The webcam test scores were also found to be related to job knowledge. Hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that the webcam test has incremental validity up to and beyond job knowledge in predicting job placement success. The webcam test, therefore, seems a promising type of instrument for personnel selection.     

Predicting Sales Performance Criteria With Personality Measures: The Use of the General Factor of Personality,the Big Five and Narrow Traits

The present study investigated the predictive validities of different hierarchical levels of personality for sales performance. The General Factor of Personality was expected to be most effective at predicting general sales performance, whereas the Big Five factors and its underlying narrow traits were expected to be most effective at predicting the specific sales performance criteria to which they are conceptually aligned. Six different sales performance measures were used in an international study involving 405 sales employees. The results suggest that General Factor of Personality is a valid predictor of general job performance but that some of the aligned narrow personality traits predict specific sales performance above and beyond the Big Five factors. The narrow trait Social Boldness has a negative relation with rated sales performance and sales results.     

“If It Helps,I’ll Carry On”: Factors Supporting the Participation of Native and Immigrant Youth in Belgium and Germany

In this article we propose looking into some factors for Civic Participation and the intention to continue to participate among local (Study I) and immigrant (Study II) young people living in Belgium and Germany. In Study I, 1,079 young people (M_age = 19.23, 44.9% males) completed a self-report questionnaire asking about their Civic Participation. Multiple linear regressions reveal (a) evidence of a pool of variables significantly linked to Civic Participation: Institutional Trust, Collective-Efficacy, Parents’ and Peers’ Support, Political Interest, Motivations and (b) that Civic Participation, along with the mediation of the Participation's Efficacy, explains the Intention to Continue to Participate. An explanatory model was constructed on participation and the Intention to Continue to Participate on behalf of the native youth. This model is invariant between the two countries. In Study II, 276 young Turkish immigrants (M_age = 20.80, 49.3% males) recruited in Belgium and Germany filled out the same questionnaire as in Study I. The same analysis was conducted as for Study I, and they provided the same results as the native group, highlighting the invariance of the model between natives and immigrants. Applicative repercussions are discussed.     

Effects of work‐related norm violations and general beliefs about the world on feelings of shame and guilt: A comparison between Turkey and the Netherlands

This paper aimed at investigating the effects of work‐related norm violations (i.e., violations of interpersonal and work regulation norms) and individuals' general beliefs about the world (i.e., social axioms: reward for application, social cynicism) on feelings of shame and guilt in Turkey and in the Netherlands. An experimental study involving 103 Turkish and 111 Dutch participants showed that work norm violations elicited feelings of guilt and shame differently in Turkey and the Netherlands. Specifically, interpersonal norm violation in Turkey elicited feelings of shame and guilt more strongly than did violation of a work regulation norm, whereas no differential effects were found in the Netherlands. As expected, violation of a work regulation norm elicited feelings of shame and guilt more strongly in the Netherlands than in Turkey, whereas violation of an interpersonal norm elicited feelings of shame and guilt more strongly in Turkey than in the Netherlands. The findings provide further evidence for the moderating effects of social axioms: in both countries, participants high in social cynicism felt less ashamed when they violated a work regulation norm than did those low in social cynicism. Our findings are relevant for understanding the underlying mechanisms of norm violations at work, thereby offering a new avenue for investigating cultural differences in the workplace. The latter may be of particular relevance in times of globalization and diversity in the workplace.     

Broad versus narrow traits: Conscientiousness and honesty–humility as predictors of academic criteria

Recent research has suggested that the six‐dimensional personality model, and especially the dimension Honesty–Humility/Integrity, adds incremental validity to the prediction of important criteria. We expected both this dimension and the dimension Conscientiousness to explain incremental variance in two academic criteria, namely grade point average (GPA) and counterproductive academic behaviour (CAB). In addition, we expected the more specific, so‐called narrow traits of Conscientiousness and Honesty–Humility/Integrity to be stronger predictors of academic criteria than the broad traits. To test these expectations, two studies were conducted using the HEXACO Personality Inventory Revised (HEXACO‐PI‐R) and the Multicultural Personality Test—Big Six (MPT‐BS). The results confirmed our expectations and suggest that academic criteria may be predicted with greater accuracy by focusing on the narrow traits of Conscientiousness and Honesty–Humility/Integrity. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fairness Perceptions of Video Resumes among Ethnically Diverse Applicants

This study investigated ethnic majority and minority applicants' fairness perceptions (N = 445) of video resumes, compared with paper resumes. Additionally, the moderating effect of minorities' ethnic identity and language proficiency on fairness perceptions of video/paper resumes was studied. Despite discriminatory concerns, ethnic minority applicants perceived the fairness of video resumes equally or more positively when compared with ethnic majority applicants, and when compared with paper resumes. Minorities' ethnic identity was positively related to fairness perceptions of resumes. Furthermore, language proficiency was a significant moderator: Higher proficiency was related to higher fairness perceptions of paper resumes. The implication is suggested that ethnic minority applicants may prefer a more personalized way of applying (video resume), instead of less personalized ways.     

Sleep enhances memory consolidation in the hippocampus-dependent object-place recognition task in rats

The positive impact of sleep on memory consolidation has been shown for human subjects in numerous studies, but there is still sparse knowledge on this topic in rats, one of the most prominent model species in neuroscience research. Here, we examined the role of sleep in the object-place recognition task, a task closely comparable to tasks typically applied for testing human declarative memory: It is a one-trial task, hippocampus-dependent, not stressful and can be repeated within the same animal. A test session consisted of the Sample trial, followed by a 2-h retention interval and a Test trial, the latter examining the memory the rat had for the places of two objects presented at the Sample trial. In Experiment 1, each rat was tested twice, with the retention interval taking place either in the morning or evening, i.e., in the inactive or active phase, respectively. Rats showed significantly (p<0.01) better memory for object place after the Morning session. To control for confounding circadian factors, in Experiment 2 rats were tested four times, i.e., in the morning or in the evening while sleep was or was not deprived. Sleep during the retention interval was recorded polysomnographically. Rats only showed significant memory for the target object place in the Test trial after the Morning retention interval in the absence of sleep deprivation, and recognition performance in this condition was significantly superior to that in the three other conditions (p<0.05). EEG recordings during spontaneous morning sleep revealed increased slow oscillation (0.85-2.0 Hz) and upper delta (2.0-4.0 Hz), but reduced spindle band (10.5-13.5 Hz) activity, as compared to evening sleep. However, spindle band power was increased in the Morning retention interval in comparison to a Morning Baseline period (p<0.05). We conclude that consolidation of object-place memory depends on sleep, and presumably requires NonREM sleep rich in both slow wave and spindle activity.     

Sleep-dependent consolidation of procedural motor memories in children and adults: the pre-sleep level of performance matters

In striking contrast to adults, in children sleep following training a motor task did not induce the expected (offline) gain in motor skill performance in previous studies. Children normally perform at distinctly lower levels than adults. Moreover, evidence in adults suggests that sleep dependent offline gains in skill essentially depend on the pre-sleep level of performance. Against this background, we asked whether improving children's performance on a motor sequence learning task by extended training to levels approaching those of adults would enable sleep-associated gains in motor skill in this age group also. Children (4-6 years) and adults (18-35 years) performed on the motor sequence learning task (button-box task) before and after ~2-hour retention intervals including either sleep (midday nap) or wakefulness. Whereas one group of children and adults, respectively, received the standard amount of 10 blocks of training before retention intervals of sleep or wakefulness, a further group of children received an extended training on 30 blocks (distributed across 3 days). A further group of adults received a restricted training on only two blocks before the retention intervals. Children after standard training reached lowest performance levels, whereas in adults performance after standard training was highest. Children with extended training and adults after reduced training reached intermediate performance levels. Only at these intermediate performance levels did sleep induce significant gains in motor sequence skill, whereas performance did not benefit from sleep in the low-performing children or in the high-performing adults. Spindle counts in the post-training nap were correlated with performance gains at retrieval only in the adults benefitting from sleep. We conclude that, across age groups, sleep induces the most robust gain in motor skill at an intermediate pre-sleep performance level. In low-performing children sleep-dependent improvements in skill may be revealed only after enhancing the pre-sleep performance level by extended training.     

Sleep strengthens integration of spatial memory systems

Spatial memory comprises different representational systems that are sensitive to different environmental cues, like proximal landmarks or local boundaries. Here we examined how sleep affects the formation of a spatial representation integrating landmark-referenced and boundary-referenced representations. To this end, participants (n = 42) were familiarized with an environment featuring both a proximal landmark and a local boundary. After nocturnal periods of sleep or wakefulness and another night of sleep, integration of the two representational systems was tested by testing the participant''s flexibility to switch from landmark-based to boundary-based navigation in the environment, and vice versa. Results indicate a distinctly increased flexibility in relying on either landmarks or boundaries for navigation, when familiarization to the environment was followed by sleep rather than by wakefulness. A second control study (n = 45) did not reveal effects of sleep (vs. wakefulness) on navigation in environments featuring only landmarks or only boundaries. Thus, rather than strengthening isolated representational systems per se, sleep presumably through forming an integrative representation, enhances flexible coordination of representational subsystems.

Wilson and McNaughton (1994) reported that “… information acquired during active behavior is … reexpressed in hippocampal circuits during sleep….” This observation of experience-dependent neural replay activity in the brain during slow-wave sleep (for review, see O''Neill et al. 2010) forms a keystone in our current understanding of how sleep affects memory consolidation in an active system consolidation process that involves the redistribution of hippocampal memory to extrahippocampal regions (McClelland et al. 1995; Diekelmann and Born 2010; Klinzing et al. 2019). According to theory, the emerging extrahippocampal memory representations are essentially schematic, devoid of specific context-information, and lack minute detail (Lewis and Durrant 2011; Payne 2011; Sekeres et al. 2018). Simultaneously, hippocampal replay strengthens hippocampal memory traces in the short-term following Hebbian learning, leading to improved context memory immediately after sleep compared with wakefulness (van der Helm et al. 2011; Weber et al. 2014). In the present study, we sought to test sleep''s role in establishing higher-level memory representations drawing on the example of spatial memory processing.Inspired by the strong role of the hippocampal formation in human spatial memory (Burgess 2008; Hartley et al. 2014) a number of studies examined effects of sleep specifically on spatial memory consolidation (Peigneux et al. 2004; Orban et al. 2006; Ferrara et al. 2008; Rauchs et al. 2008; Wamsley et al. 2010; Nguyen et al. 2013; Noack et al. 2017). In these studies, participants explored a virtual environment during a learning phase before retention periods of sleep and wakefulness and, later on, engaged in specific retrieval tasks that required to reach a predefined goal location in the environment as fast as possible. Results were mixed with, some studies reporting positive effects of sleep on spatial navigation performance (e.g., Peigneux et al. 2004; Wamsley et al. 2010; Nguyen et al. 2013; Noack et al. 2017), whereas in others such sleep effect depended on the length of the retention interval (e.g., Ferrara et al. 2008), or was completely absent (Orban et al. 2006; Rauchs et al. 2008). Interestingly, in the latter studies—despite absent behavioral effects—using a 72-h retention interval between learning and retrieval testing, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggested that sleep favors a shift from activation of hippocampal areas toward preferential activation of striatal areas at retrieval of the relevant spatial representations.Indeed, spatial navigation can rely on two distinct representational systems that involve as key structures hippocampal and striatal circuitry, respectively, and are also linked to different spatial frames of reference (Burgess 2008; Hartley et al. 2014). Doeller et al. (2008) showed in humans that striatal activation is linked to the processing of single proximal landmarks whereas hippocampal activation is related to the processing of spatial boundaries, and that acquisition of representations in both systems may follow different learning rules (Doeller and Burgess 2008). The subject''s reliance on one or the other representation system depends on the specific navigational problem (Maguire et al. 1998; Hartley et al. 2003) as well as familiarity with the environment (Hartley et al. 2003; Iaria et al. 2003; Packard and McGaugh 1996), but both systems can also be activated in parallel and interact. For example, patients with hippocampal atrophy showed impaired memory performance not only for boundary-based but also for landmark-based navigation (Guderian et al. 2015) suggesting the presence of synergistic effects between the representational systems. The activation of the representational systems is presumably coordinated by the medial prefrontal cortex (Ragozzino et al. 1999; Doeller et al. 2008; Rich and Shapiro 2009), that is, a region that is not only involved in the abstraction of schema-like spatial representations (Tse et al. 2011; van Buuren et al. 2014) but, also shows neuronal reactivation during sleep (Euston et al. 2007; Peyrache et al. 2009).In fact, there is first evidence suggesting that sleep supports the formation of abstract representations of space in particular. We found, for example, that sleep benefitted the extraction of semantic structure (regions defined by semantic category of landmarks) in a virtual navigation task (Noack et al. 2017). To date, there is no study, however, to specifically test the interaction between landmark- and boundary-referenced representations of space and their integration during sleep. Here we sought to fill this gap. Drawing on the active systems consolidation concept of sleep (Dudai et al. 2015; Klinzing et al. 2019) and on the existing literature, we followed the hypothesis that, rather than benefiting a specific spatial representation, sleep via neuronal replay primarily supports the formation of an integrative schema-like spatial representation and, thereby, improves flexibility in the use of hippocampus-based and striatum-based representations.To this end, we conducted two experiments, a Main experiment and a Control experiment, using a virtual spatial environment with one proximal landmark and a local boundary (Fig. 1) to preferentially engage striatum and hippocampus-based representational systems, respectively (Doeller et al. 2008). The Main experiment was designed to test the effect of sleep on the integration of landmark-referenced and boundary-referenced representations of space. To this end, participants were first familiarized with an environment featuring both a landmark and a boundary, thereby encoding both hippocampal as well as striatal representations of the environment. In order to test whether sleep enhances the integration of these representations, participants either slept or remained awake on the night after the Familiarization phase. They then learned new objects in impoverished environments featuring the same spatial cues (landmark and boundary) at the same locations but only one at a time. At a final Test session, the integration of the combined environmental layout including landmark and boundary (as presented during Familiarization before sleep) was investigated by the participant''s flexibility to switch from landmark-based to boundary-based navigation in the environment, and vice versa, from boundary-based to landmark-based navigation (Fig. 1). In the Control experiment, we investigated the direct effect of postlearning sleep or wakefulness on the consolidation of spatial memory representation that were either merely boundary-referenced or landmark-referenced, thereby controlling for general effects of sleep on spatial memory performance.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.Task and general procedures. (A) Example views on the three different environments. (Panel i) landmark and boundary present, as used in the Familiarization phase of the Main experiment. Alpine environment (panel ii), and Desert environment (panel iii) as used in the Control experiment. (B) Task procedure: The task featured three different trial types in both experiments. (Panel i) Acquisition trials were presented at the start of Familiarization and Learning phases in both experiments. (Panel ii) Feedback and Test trials started with the presentation of an object on a gray screen. Participants were then placed in the experimental environment containing boundary (thick encirclement), landmarks (traffic cone) or both, and dropped the object at the location where they found it during acquisition. In Feedback trials feedback was given by presenting the object at its correct location. Participants navigated to it to collect it. (C) Design of Main experiment: Environment featured both landmark and boundary cues during Familiarization. The Test session comprised Learning phase and Retrieval phase. Only one spatial cue (landmark or boundary) was present during each trial of the Learning and Retrieval phase (three objects with landmark, three objects with boundary). Object reference switched from Learning to Retrieval phase: Objects presented together with the landmark during learning were presented with boundary during retrieval and vice versa. Note that a specific spatial cue was always at the same relative position when presented during Familiarization, Learning, and Test. (D) Design of Control experiment: Participants were randomly assigned to the Boundary or the Landmark group, whereas all participants performed in Wake and Sleep condition. Each of the two visits (sleep and wake) consisted of two sessions (learning: six Acquisition trials + four blocks and six feedback trials; retrieval: three blocks and six Test trials).To preview our results: Whereas there was no effect of sleep on landmark- and boundary-referenced spatial memory per se in the Control experiment, sleep indeed facilitated the flexible use of different spatial retrieval cues possibly based on a superior integrated spatial memory representation.     

Perception of moving, sounding objects by four-month-old infants

Infants and adults were presented with two moving objects accompanied by a single percussive sound. In different experiments, the sound occurred when one object moved through a particular spatial position, when it abruptly changed its direction of movement, or when it made contact with a rigid surface. Infants responded to the sound-object relationship whenever the sound occurred as the object changed direction, irrespective of its impacts with the surface. Adults, in contrast, responded to the sound-object relationship most clearly when sounds were synchronized with impacts. In infancy, perception of auditory-visual relationships thus depends in part on detection of discontinuities in the movement of a visible object.