The impact of feedback from job and task autonomy in the relationship between dispositional resistance to change and innovative work behaviour

Building on an interactionist approach, the present study investigated the moderating role of two task design characteristics, namely task autonomy and feedback from job, in the relationship between dispositional resistance to change and innovative work behaviour. Consistent with a trait activation perspective, it was specifically hypothesized that dispositional resistance to change would have a stronger, positive association with innovative performance when autonomy and feedback were high than when they were low. In a sample of 270 employees from the public sector, task autonomy was found to significantly interact with both composite resistance to change and with three of the four dimensions (routine seeking, short-term thinking, and emotional reaction). Simple slope analyses specifically revealed that individuals high in short-term thinking and emotional reaction exhibited positive relationships with innovative behaviour only in the case of high task autonomy, whereas in the case of low autonomy the relationship was nonsignificant. Furthermore, feedback from job was found to moderate the relationship between overarching dispositional resistance to change, short-term thinking, and emotional reaction, on one hand, and innovative performance, on the other, such that a positive and significant association emerged only in the case of high feedback.     

Frankfurt versus Frankfurt: a new anti-causalist dawn

There is an important anomaly to the causalist/compatibilist paradigm in the philosophy of action and free will. This anomaly, which to my knowledge has gone unnoticed so far, can be found in the philosophy of Harry Frankfurt. Two of his most important contributions to the field – his influential counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities and his ‘guidance’ view of action – are incompatible. Frankfurt's counterexample to the Principle works only if we do not understand action as Frankfurt does in his guidance account. If, on the other hand, we understand agency in terms of the agent's guidance, then his counterexample to the Principle fails because, then, counterfactual scenarios of Frankfurt-type counterexamples are such that what happens does not count as the relevant agent's action. So Frankfurt-type counterexamples do not show that the agent could not have avoided acting as she did: so they fail to offer a scenario in which the agent is intuitively responsible even though she could not have avoided acting as she did. Therefore, Frankfurt-type counterexamples do not challenge the Principle, according to which ‘a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise’. The importance of this inconsistency goes far beyond the issue of coherence within Frankfurt's philosophy. I shall argue that this inconsistency represents an important anomaly within the causalist/compatibilist framework; so that we should start to seriously consider having to move on from the established paradigm.     

What clocks tell us about the neural correlates of spatial imagery

We review a series of experimental studies aimed at answering some critical questions about the neural basis of spatial imagery. Our group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the neural correlates of an online behaviourally controlled spatial imagery task without need for visual presentation—the mental clock task. Subjects are asked to imagine pairs of times that are presented acoustically and to judge at which of the two times the clock hands form the greater angle. The cortical activation elicited by this task was contrasted with that obtained during other visual, perceptual, verbal, and spatial imagery tasks in several block design studies. Moreover, our group performed an event‐related fMRI study on the clock task to investigate the representation of component cognitive processes in spatial imagery. The bulk of our findings demonstrates that cortical areas in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), along the intraparietal sulcus, are robustly involved in spatial mental imagery and in other tasks requiring spatial transformations. PPC is bilaterally involved in different kinds of spatial judgement. Yet the degree to which right and left PPC are activated in different tasks is a function of task requirements. From event‐related fMRI data we obtained evidence that left and right PPC are activated asynchronously during the clock task and this could reflect their different functional role in subserving cognitive components of visuospatial imagery.     

Limits in controlling the focus of attention

Abstract

In a series of five experiments, we attempted to answer three questions concerning the flexibility of visuospatial attention: Is it possible to exert control on the shape of the attentional focus? Can attention be distributed not uniformly but in a gradient fashion within the focus? Does the way in which attentional resources are distributed within the focus affect the way in which they are distributed outside its borders? We provide evidence indicating that observers successfully allocated attention to the cued region. When the cued region was demarcated by a polygon, target detection was speeded up within the polygon. The results also show that the observers were unable to suppress information arising from an irrelevant location falling between two relevant locations (Experiments 1, 2, 3A and 3B). In accord with the zoom lens model, we interpret these results as suggesting that attention forms a unitary zone that may expand to encompass multiple relevant locations but must also include the area between them. In addition, we found that some sort of lateral masking effect occurred when the borders were close to the target location. In Experiment 4, we obtained a gradient inside     

Attending to objects: costs or benefits?

The single-object advantage is said to occur when performance is faster and/or more accurate when the two targets to be compared appear on one object than when they appear on two different objects. The single-object advantage has been interpreted to suggest that attention can select objects rather than unparsed regions of visual space. In five experiments we explored whether directing attention to one object rather than two objects produces a benefit or a minor cost. Participants were required to compare two target features that belonged to one object, to two objects, or did not belong to any object. In addition, we varied the relevance to the task of object-related global information, such as symmetry of the object and perceptual cluttering of the background. Results showed that attending to one object in comparison to attending to no object produced a benefit only when object-related global information was relevant to the task. In contrast, when object-related global information was irrelevant to the task, attending to one object produced a cost. Thus, it can be concluded that attending to an object does not produce an absolute benefit, but rather produces a smaller cost than attending to two objects.     

Forgetting curves in long-term memory: evidence for a multistage model of retention.

An experimental study with 20 normal healthy young adult subjects was performed to evaluate the interaction of type of memory tasks, type of learning modalities, and length of acquisition/recall interval. Four different tasks were employed (serial learning, paired learning, rote learning, and visuolinguistic transfer), some requiring a single trial learning modality others a multitrial learning modality. Acquisition/recall intervals were immediate, intermediate (3 min), and delayed. The experimental design allowed for the comparison of effects from five different delayed recall intervals (2, 8, 12, 24, and 48 hr). Results demonstrated a specific interaction on learning rates due to different ceiling effects for the different types of memory tasks. Forgetting rates, on the other hand, demonstrated a specific effect due to type of memory tasks and learning modalities only for differences between immediate and intermediate recall. These differences remained stable during the longer intervals and were not affected by length of interval. A multistage composition of long-term retention was suggested to explain these results, and a practical indication to build experimental procedures to study memory in the clinical field was evidenced.     

Risk Factors for Attempting Suicide in Prisoners

We wished to examine determinants of suicidal behavior in prisoners. 903 male prisoners had a psychiatric interview which included various psychometric tests. Suicide attempters were compared with prisoners who had never attempted suicide. Significantly more of the attempters had a history of psychiatric disorder, substance abuse, a family history of suicidal behavior, convictions for violent crime, had exhibited aggressive behavior in jail, and had higher BGLHA aggression scores. A similar pattern of risk factors was found for prisoners with suicidal ideation. A lifetime history of attempting suicide, or of having suicidal ideation, is frequent in prisoners. Risk factors include family, developmental, aggression, personality, psychiatric, and substance abuse factors.     

The retrieval of abstract and concrete materials as functions of imagery,mediation, and mnemonic aids

Department of Educational Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802 This study is a report of an investigation of the interaction between imagery ability and processes employed for facilitating recall. The tasks were assumed to involve contrasting processes through the use of imaginal or verbal mediators and concrete or abstract jingles (mnemonic aids) in memorizing two concrete and two abstract lists of 10 words in each list. The dependent variables were latencies in arriving at an association, number of errors and omissions on immediate recall, and number of errors and omissions on delayed recall. The main effects of imagery ability, favoring high imagers, and of kind of lists favoring concrete lists were significant. In delayed recall there was a significant interaction of mnemonic aid and kind of list. Imagery ability interacted with mediators to influence Ss’ recall. The results were discussed as supporting Paivio’s two-stage association model.