Can attentional control settings be maintained for two color–location conjunctions? Evidence from an RSVP task

Previous investigations of the ability to maintain separate attentional control settings for different spatial locations have relied principally on a go/no-go spatial-cueing paradigm. The results have suggested that control of attention is accomplished only late in processing. However, the go/no-go task does not provide strong incentives to withhold attention from irrelevant color–location conjunctions. We used a modified version of the task in which failing to adopt multiple control settings would be detrimental to performance. Two RSVP streams of colored letters appeared to the left and right of fixation. Participants searched for targets that were a conjunction of color and location, so that the target color for one stream acted as a distractor when presented in the opposite stream. Distractors that did not match the target conjunctions nevertheless captured attention and interfered with performance. This was the case even when the target conjunctions were previewed early in the trial prior to the target (Exp. 2). However, distractor interference was reduced when the upcoming distractor was previewed early on in the trial (Exp. 3). Attentional selection of targets by color–location conjunctions may be effective if facilitative attentional sets are accompanied by the top-down inhibition of irrelevant items.     

The Mitigating Role of Trait Core Confidence on Psychological Distress in Entrepreneurship

We conceptualize the mitigating role of trait core confidence on psychological distress in entrepreneurship manifested by occupational stress, anxiety, and depression. To facilitate field research, we first developed a short trait core confidence scale and validated it in six independent samples (N = 2,434). To test our hypothesis that trait core confidence negatively relates to base-line levels of psychological distress as well as reduces fluctuations of distress in entrepreneurship, we collected data from a 3-day entrepreneurial event called Startup Weekend across seven occasions in the United States. High trait core confidence was related to lower psychological distress both at the start of the event on Friday and at the end of it on Sunday. Core confidence remained stable from Friday to Sunday, as well as 1 month following the event, affirming its trait properties. Additionally, we measured team confidence during the event and found that high team confidence reduced psychological distress of team members. This research contributes to the research on the role of dispositions in occupational health psychology and to a better understanding of how distress of aspiring entrepreneurs is mitigated by trait core confidence.     

Behavioral strategies for reducing disease transmission in the workplace

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted that workplaces may serve as a hub of disease transmission if proper precautions are not enacted. The Centers for Disease Control recommends several strategies for decreasing the spread of illnesses in the workplace, including a) promoting proper hand hygiene, b) cleaning and sanitizing the work area, c) encouraging sick employees to stay home, d) personal protective equipment, and, e) social distancing. Research suggests that instructions are often not sufficient to change work behaviors, and behavioral interventions may be needed. Thus, the present paper reviews existing research that informs the implementation of behavioral strategies to reduce the spread of disease in the workplace, and makes recommendations for organizations to protect employees, clients, and customers. Intervention components such as training, prompts, the reduction of response effort, clear workplace policies, feedback, and consequences are discussed, and practical recommendations and suggestions for future research are provided.     

The bilingual effects of linguistic distances on episodic memory and verbal fluency

The impact of linguistic distance or the relatedness between two languages, on bilinguals’ episodic memory performance and verbal fluency is an understudied area. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine if differences in linguistic distances have differential effects on these abilities. Measures of episodic recognition, categorical fluency, and global cognitive functioning were also considered in the analyses. Two matched samples with participants living and educated in Sweden were drawn from the Betula Prospective Cohort Study. Results showed that bilinguals who speak linguistically similar languages (Swedish and English), performed significantly better than monolinguals on both episodic memory recall and letter fluency, while bilinguals who speak two languages that are more distant (Swedish and Finnish), showed no advantages compared to their monolingual counterparts. For both tasks, however, a linear trend was observed indicative of better performance for the Swedish-English group compared to the Finnish-Swedish group, and for the Swedish-Finnish group compared to the monolinguals group. As expected, no differences between groups were found in any of the other cognitive tasks. Overall, results suggest that the impact of linguistic distances should be explored in more detail in the future.     

Adding Types,But Not Tokens,Affects Property Induction

The extent to which we generalize a novel property from a sample of familiar instances to novel instances depends on the sample composition. Previous property induction experiments have only used samples consisting of novel types (unique entities). Because real-world evidence samples often contain redundant tokens (repetitions of the same entity), we studied the effects on property induction of adding types and tokens to an observed sample. In Experiments 1–3, we presented participants with a sample of birds or flowers known to have a novel property and probed whether this property generalized to novel items varying in similarity to the initial sample. Increasing the number of novel types (e.g., new birds with the target property) in a sample produced tightening, promoting property generalization to highly similar stimuli but decreasing generalization to less similar stimuli. On the other hand, increasing the number of tokens (e.g., repeated presentations of the same bird with the target property) had little effect on generalization. Experiment 4 showed that repeated tokens are encoded and can benefit recognition, but appear to be given little weight when inferring property generalization. We modified an existing Bayesian model of induction (Navarro, Dry, & Lee, 2012) to account for both the information added by new types and the discounting of information conveyed by tokens.     

The real thing: preschoolers prefer actual activities to pretend ones

Pretend play is a quintessential activity of early childhood, and adults supply children with many toys to encourage it. Do young children actually prefer to pretend, or do they do it because they are unable to engage in some activities for real? Here we examined, for nine different activities, American middle‐class preschoolers' preferences for pretend and real activities. The 100 children we tested (M = 58.5 months, range 36 to 82 months) overwhelmingly preferred real activities to pretend ones, and this preference increased from age 3 to age 4, then remained steady through age 6. Children provided cogent justifications for their preferences. The results are discussed with reference to other domains in which children show reality preferences and with respect to the content of preschool curricula.