The Many Faces of Commitment: Facet-Level Links to Performance in Military Contexts

Over the past two decades, considerable progress has been achieved in an effort to better identify and understand the various types of organizational commitment, the foci toward which such committed bonds are directed, and the myriad outcomes associated with these bonds. This research adds to and extends such work within a military context. Specifically, we explore relations among various forms (e.g., affective, normative, and continuance) of both team- and military-focused commitment and several supervisory-rated performance criteria. Across the different criteria, team-focused commitment tended to be a stronger predictor of performance than military-oriented commitment did. However, military-oriented commitment was inversely related to supervisory ratings of soldiers' negative behaviors. We discuss the psychological mechanisms that likely drive these findings, the implications of this work, and several potentially fruitful next steps within this research domain.     

Effect of a retention interval between pre-exposure and conditioning on latent inhibition in humans using a blink conditioning procedure

Latent inhibition, retarded learning after pre-exposure to the to-be-conditioned stimulus, was examined using a blink conditioned procedure in humans. Experiment 1 showed that the procedure is suited to inducing the latent inhibition effect. In Experiment 2, the introduction of a 3-minute interval between pre-exposure and conditioning phases attenuated latent inhibition. These results contribute to identify the mechanisms involved in pre-exposure and subsequent conditioning of a stimulus, which is particularly important if we bear in mind that latent inhibition has been used repeatedly as an instrument to analyze the course of attentional processes in normal and pathological populations.     

Assessment of the global intelligence and selective cognitive capacities in preterm 8-year-old children

The aim of this study was to assess various cognitive abilities such as attention, IQ, reasoning, and memory related to academic achievement in 8- and 9-year-old preterm children. A total of 141 children were assessed. The preterm group (=37 weeks) comprised 63 children and was compared to 78 full-term children. Attention was evaluated using the d2 Selective Attention test, and the IQ by the L-M form of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, establishing a profile of abilities: perception, memory, comprehension, reasoning, and verbal fluency. Significant differences in IQ were found between the preterm and full-term children. Of the cognitive abilities assessed, the only significant differences were found in verbal fluency, with preterm boys showing lower verbal fluency scores than full-term children. In conclusion, all preterm groups have attention ability similar to that of full-term children. However, preterm children obtain lower scores in intelligence measures. In addition, preterm boys have verbal fluency difficulties. Taking into account the increase in preterm births, suitable intervention programs must be planned to attend the difficulties found.     

Reduced blocking as a result of increasing the number of blocking cues

Weak behavioral control (blocking) occurs when a target stimulus (X) is paired with an outcome in the presence of a well-established signal for the outcome (i.e., a blocking stimulus). Conventional Pavlovian conditioning theories explain this effect by asserting that a discrepancy between expected and experienced outcomes is necessary for learning about X and that no such discrepancy exists in blocking situations. These theories anticipate that the effect of additional well-established signals for the unconditioned stimulus (US) should be additive. In two conditioned barpress suppression experiments using rats as subjects, the opposite result was observed. Experiment 1 provided evidence that blocking was reduced when two blocking stimuli were present during X-US pairings relative to when one blocking stimulus was present. Experiment 2 elaborated on the mechanisms underlying the observations in Experiment 1, while explaining the discrepancy between the results of Experiment 1 and prior reports of the additivity of blocking stimuli. nt]mis|The research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 33881.     

Effects of extinction in multiple contexts on the renewal of associative tolerance to ethanol

The Pavlovian analysis of drug tolerance describes how the contexts of drug administration participate in the elicitation of compensatory conditioned responses that are, at least partly, responsible for tolerance. Findings indicate that if an association is acquired in one context and extinguished in another one, when exposing the subjects to the acquisition context, renewal of the conditioned response will take place. Ambiguous evidence exists about whether or not this effect diminishes when extinguishing the association in multiple contexts. This investigation evaluates the existence of the phenomenon of renewal of tolerance to ethanol, and whether it diminishes by the extinction in multiple contexts. Evidence of renewal of tolerance to ethanol in rats was found, but no diminution was observed when extinguishing in multiple contexts.     

Defeasibility and Inferential Particularism

In this paper I argue that defeasible (nonmonotonic) inferences are occasion-sensitive: the inferential connections of a given claim (plus collateral premises) depend on features of the circumstances surrounding the occasion of inference (including typical environmental conditions, and also pragmatic and contextual factors, such as the information available to agents and how high stakes are). More specifically, it is an occasion-sensitive matter which possible defeaters have to be considered explicitly by the premises of an inference and which possible defeaters may remain unconsidered, without making the inference enthymematic. As a result, a largely unexplored form of occasion-sensitivity arises in inferentialist theories of content that appeal to defeasible inferences.     

A confirmatory factor analysis of the "Autoconcepto Forma 5" questionnaire in young adults from Spain and Chile

The aim of this work is to examine the pentafactorial validity of the AF5 Self-Concept Questionnaire in Spanish and Chilean young adults. From the responses of a total of 4,383 young adults aged 17 to 22 years (1,918 Spanish, 44%, and 2,465 Chilean, 56%) it was analyzed the reliability of the instrument, the compared validity of the 5 oblique factor model proposed by the authors versus the unifactorial and the orthogonal alternative models, and was studied the invariance of one Chilean sample. The results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the authors' pentafactorial model. The multi-group factorial invariance showed that Chilean sample of the AF5 does not change neither the Spanish factor weights, nor the variances and covariances of the factors, or the error variances of items. Finally, the internal consistency of the five scales was good in the samples of both countries.     

Extreme Betting

It is often thought that bets on the truth of known propositions become irrational if the losing costs are high enough. This is typically taken to count against the view that knowledge involves assigning credence 1. I argue that the irrationality of such extreme bets can be explained by considering the interactions between the agent and the bookmaker. More specifically, the agent’s epistemic perspective is altered by the fact that the bookmaker proposes that unusual type of bet. Among other things, being willing to offer a bet with unnecessarily harmful losing costs is likely to undermine the baseline level of trustworthiness required for it to be rational to engage in betting exchanges. This sort of explanation does not require granting either that we assign credence lower than 1 to known propositions or that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes. Moreover, I show that, in our ordinary lives, we frequently perform actions that we know would be disastrous if certain conditions did not obtain. This behaviour can be seen as a form of implicit extreme betting and, nevertheless, it is often rational.     

TPL—KATS-card sort: A tool for assessing structural knowledge

The study of how individuals organize knowledge has been a popular endeavor for several decades. As a result, techniques have been developed to assess how individuals represent and organize knowledge internally. Although several conceptual knowledge elicitation methods have been developed and used to assess the organization of knowledge, their use is often labor intensive and time consuming. Presented here is a software tool that was developed to reduce the problems associated with manually administering the conceptual knowledge elicitation technique, or card sorting. The TPL—KATS-card sort software not only simplifies the administration of the task, but also adds features to the card-sorting task such as media insertion, time stamping, and instructorless administration. In the present article, an introduction to the card-sorting technique is provided, the new software tool is described, and the advantages of the software are detailed.