The interactive effects of job advertisement characteristics and applicant experience on reactions to recruitment messages

Job seekers often use job advertisements presented during the early stages of recruitment to gather important information about potential employers. Content of these advertisements as well as associated peripheral cues have the potential to influence job seekers' organizational attitudes. Using the elaboration likelihood model as a theoretical framework, the authors proposed that job seekers' previous work and job search experience moderate the extent to which these job advertisement characteristics influence attitudes towards organizations. Results suggest that the content of job advertisements influence the organizational attitudes of experienced job seekers more than their inexperienced counterparts. Additionally, the presence of peripheral cues (i.e. physical attractiveness of those persons shown in recruitment material) appears to have a greater effect on the organizational attractiveness perceptions of job seekers having less work and job search experience versus those having more experience. Implications of the findings regarding organizational recruitment practices are discussed.     

Episodic memory deficits slow down the dynamics of cognitive procedural learning in normal ageing

Cognitive procedural learning is characterised by three phases, each involving distinct processes. Considering the implication of episodic memory in the first cognitive stage, the impairment of this memory system might be responsible for a slowing down of the cognitive procedural learning dynamics in the course of ageing. Performances of massed cognitive procedural learning were evaluated in older and younger participants using the Tower of Toronto task. Nonverbal intelligence and psychomotor abilities were used to analyse procedural dynamics, while episodic memory and working memory were assessed to measure their respective contributions to learning strategies. This experiment showed that older participants did not spontaneously invoke episodic memory and presented a slowdown in the cognitive procedural learning associated with a late involvement of working memory. These findings suggest that the slowdown in the cognitive procedural learning may be linked with the implementation of different learning strategies less involving episodic memory in older participants.     

Physical activity and sedentary lifestyle in children as time-limited functions: Usefulness of the principal component analysis method

This study was designed to examine the hourly variation in and the interplay between physical activity and sedentary behavior (SB) in order to highlight key time periods for physical activity interventions for children. Data for physical activity and SB obtained with ActiGraph in 56 boys and 47 girls aged from 8 to 11 years. These data were divided into sixty minute-time samples for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and SB, and analyzed using a principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation statistics. The PCA provides 10 factors which account for 80.4% of the inertia. Only two of these factors did not display competition between MVPA and SB. Contrary to some reports, a coefficient of correlation of -.68 (p < 10(-4)) was found between daily time spent at MVPA and SB. Some salient traits of children's behaviors were shown through PCA. The results suggested that efficacy of interventions targeting the morning hours (07:00 AM-11:59 AM) and the afternoon period (02:00 PM-05:59 PM) warrants attention.     

Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany

This article provides a short summary of a representative survey on near-death experiences (NDEs) in Germany, which is the first of its kind in Europe. We tested several assumptions derived from previous research on NDEs, including the assumptions of a unified pattern of experience, the universality of the pattern, and the necessary link between NDEs and clinical death. We received replies from more than 2,000 persons, 4 percent of whom reported NDEs. The patterns of the NDEs did not seem to correspond to earlier findings: aside from being much more diverse, they also differed with respect to cultural variables, particularly the difference between religious interpretations and the differences between post-socialist East Germany and West Germany.     

Where and how does grammatically geared processing take place-and why is Broca's area often involved. A coordinated fMRI/ERBP study of language processing

We address the possibility of combining the results from hemodynamic and electrophysiological methods for the study of cognitive processing of language. The hemodynamic method we use is Event-Related fMRI, and the electrophysiological method measures Event-Related Band Power (ERBP) of the EEG signal. The experimental technique allows us to approach the relation between cortical structure and cognitive function in a sophisticated way. In particular, we can formulate original working hypotheses about the language-induced changes in the ongoing brain dynamics. We show, on the basis of electrophysiological data collected in an experiment on language production, that synchronized cortical networks code cognitive processes induced by language in form of power modulations of specific frequency bands. The hemodynamic (fMRI) data collected in the same task point to the existence of a central processor for the phrase structure assignment. We conceptualize such a central processor as a frequency scanner, a cortical device designed to pick up synchronized brain activity over a specific range of frequencies. We discuss the experimental designs which result from this set of hypotheses and show their relevance for the models of language processing.     

Auditory and visual spatial working memory

A series of experiments compared short-term memory for object locations in the auditory and visual modalities. The stimulus materials consisted of sounds and pictures presented at different locations in space. Items were presented in pure- or mixed-modality lists of increasing length. At test, participants responded to renewed presentation of the objects by indicating their original position. If two independent modality-specific and resource-limited short-term memories support the remembering of locations, memory performance should be higher in the mixed-modality than in the pure-modality condition. Yet, memory performance was the same for items in both types of list. In addition, responses to the memory load manipulation in both modalities showed very similar declines in performance. The results are interpreted in terms of object files binding object and location information in episodic working memory, independently of the input modality.     

The spatial mismatch effect is based on global configuration and not on perceptual records within the visual cache

If configurations of objects are presented in a S1-S2 matching task for the identity of objects a spatial mismatch effect occurs. Changing the (irrelevant) spatial layout lengthens response times. We investigated what causes this effect. We observed a reliable mismatch effect that was not influenced by a secondary task during maintenance. Neither articulatory suppression (Experiment 1), nor unattended (Experiments 2 and 6) or attended visual material (Experiment 3) reduced the effect, and this was independent of the length of the retention interval (Experiment 6). The effect was also rather independent of the visual appearance of the local elements. It was of similar size with color patches (Experiment 4) and with completely different surface information when testing was cross modal (Experiment 5), and the name-ability of the global configuration was not relevant (Experiments 6 and 7). In contrast, the figurative similarity of the configurations of S1 and S2 systematically influenced the size of the spatial mismatch effect (Experiment 7). We conclude that the spatial mismatch effect is caused by a mismatch of the global shape of the configuration stored together with the objects of S1 and not by a mismatch of templates of perceptual records maintained in a visual cache.     

Moral hypocrisy: addressing some alternatives

Two studies addressed alternative explanations for 3 pieces of evidence supporting the existence of moral hypocrisy. In Study 1, no support was found for the idea that low salience of social standards accounts for falsifying the result of a coin flip to assign oneself a more desirable task. In Study 2, no support was found for the idea that responses of those who honestly win the flip account for the higher ratings of morality of their action by participants who assign themselves the more desirable task after flipping the coin. Also, no support was found for the idea that responses of those who honestly win the flip account for the inability of personal moral responsibility measures to predict moral action. Instead, results of both studies provided additional evidence of moral hypocrisy.     

Intelligence without representation – Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation The relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip.     

Arguments from Ostension

My purpose here is to describe a type of argument characterized by the fact that one of its premises is a directive—i.e. what is expressed by a directive sentence: a general instruction how to proceed or act. This directive premise brings an ostensive mechanism for the inclusion of visual or multimodal elements in an argument. If an argument is an invitation to inference (Robert Pinto), by using such a directive utterance the addresser is inviting the addressee to make an inference from an image, not from a proposition. Hence I will call them arguments from ostension or from deixis.