An investigation of everyday prospective memory

Prospective memory, remembering to carry out one’s planned activities, was investigated using a naturalistic paradigm. Three experiments, with a total of 405 participants, were conducted. The goal was to demonstrate that the cognitive processing underlying successful everyday prospective remembering involves components other than mere “memory.” Those components are probably best represented as individual differences in various cognitive capacities. More specifically, metamemory, attentional capacities, and planning processes that reprioritize intentions according to the demands of everyday life may determine how people actually accomplish the plans they establish for themselves. The results of these experiments suggest that researchers interested in the topic will have to contend with a multidimensional set of factors before any comprehensive understanding of prospective remembering can be realized.     

Administration of inhalation anesthetics to small animals: Some problems and solutions

Some problems inherent in administering inhalation anesthetics to small laboratory animals in studies of memory consolidation are discussed. A simple and inexpensive apparatus which has been designed to eliminate some of these problems is described.     

Testing the Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance Across Gender of the Big Five Inventory Through Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling

Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) typically fail to support the a priori 5-factor structure of Big Five self-report instruments, due in part to the overly restrictive CFA assumptions. We show that exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), an integration of CFA and exploratory factor analysis, overcomes these problems in relation to responses to the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) administered to a large Italian community sample. ESEM fitted the data better and resulted in less correlated factors than CFA, although ESEM and CFA factor scores correlated at near unity with observed raw scores. Tests of gender invariance with a 13-model taxonomy of full measurement invariance showed that the factor structure of the BFI is gender-invariant and that women score higher on Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness. Through ESEM one could address substantively important issues about BFI psychometric properties that could not be appropriately addressed through traditional approaches.     

Investigating the Effects of Applicant Justice Perceptions on Job Offer Acceptance

Drawing on extant recruitment and organizational justice theory, this research examines the effects of justice perceptions on job acceptance decisions across 2 samples (n = 332 and 2,974) of applicants to jobs within the U.S. military. More specifically, we examine justice–job offer acceptance relations relative to other pertinent recruitment predictors including, organizational image, familiarity, person–organization (P–O) fit perceptions, and recruiter behaviors. Findings from both studies support the importance of justice perceptions in influencing job offer acceptance. Fairness perceptions accounted for 29.37% and 19.22% of the unique variance in job offer acceptance, in Studies 1 and 2, respectively. The results of this research provide much needed empirical evidence to the scant literature on actual job acceptance and highlight important practical implications for employers.     

Memory systems in the rat: effects of reward probability,context, and congruency between working and reference memory

The interaction of working and reference memory was studied in rats on an eight-arm radial maze. In two experiments, rats were trained to perform working memory and reference memory tasks. On working memory trials, they were allowed to enter four randomly chosen arms for reward in a study phase and then had to choose the unentered arms for reward in a test phase. On reference memory trials, they had to learn to visit the same four arms on the maze on every trial for reward. Retention was tested on working memory trials in which the interval between the study and test phase was 15 s, 15 min, or 30 min. At each retention interval, tests were performed in which the correct WM arms were either congruent or incongruent with the correct RM arms. Both experiments showed that congruency interacted with retention interval, yielding more forgetting at 30 min on incongruent trials than on congruent trials. The effect of reference memory strength on the congruency effect was examined in Experiment 1, and the effect of associating different contexts with working and reference memory on the congruency effect was studied in Experiment 2.     

PHILOSOPHER OF PRECISION AND SOUL: INTRODUCING WALKER PERCY

This article introduces the work of philosopher‐novelist Walker Percy to the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science readership. After some biographical and contextual preliminaries, I suggest that the conceptual collecting feature to Percy's work is his critique of abstractionism manifest in a tripartite congruence of Cartesianism, derivatively misapplied science, and social atomism.     

‘Theology on Its Knees’: The Arts as Religion

Books reviewed in this article: Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art