How and for Whom Time Control Matter for Innovation? The Role of Positive Affect and Problem-Solving Demands

Job resources are essential for higher performance. Focusing on innovation, we examine how and for whom the job resource of time control is related to the implementation of novel ideas in the workplace. Drawing on the job demands-resources model and affect-as-information theory, we propose that positive affect explains how the association of time control with innovation unfolds and how this psychological process depends on the extent to which employees work under problem-solving demands. Using a survey study, conducted with 198 employees from diverse organisations, we supported a mediation mechanism in which time control was positively associated with positive affect, which is turn was positively related to innovation. Furthermore, the strength of this mediation process depended on problem-solving demands, such that positive affect and innovation resulting from time control was stronger for those working in complex environments. These results corroborate and expand knowledge on the job demands-resources, affect and innovation literatures, showing that job resources matter for performance, particularly in conjunction with job complexity denoting challenging performance. Thus, organisations should be aware of opportunities to manage the degree of job control and complexity if they aim to foster employee innovation.     

Contrasting hippocampal and perirhinalcortex function using immediate early gene imaging

The perirhinal cortex and hippocampus have close anatomical links, and it might, therefore, be predicted that they have close, interlinked roles in memory. Lesion studies have, however, often failed to support this prediction, providing dissociations and double dissociations between the two regions on tests of object recognition and spatial memory. In a series of rat studies we have compared these two regions using the expression of the immediate early gene c-fosas a marker of neuronal activity. This gene imaging approach makes it possible to assess the relative involve-ment of different brain regions and avoids many of the limitations of the lesion approach. A very consistent pattern of results was found as the various hippocampal subfields but not the peri-rhinal cortex show increased c-fosactivity following tests of spatial learning. In contrast, the perirhinal cortex but none of the hippocampal subfields show increased c-fosactivity when presented with novel rather than familiar visual objects. When novel scenes are created by the spatial rearrangement of familiar objects it is the hippocampus and not the perirhinal cortex that shows c-foschanges. This double dissociation for gene expression accords with that found from lesion studies and highlights the different contributions of the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus to memory.     

Preconditions of predication: From qualia to quantum mechanics

Although in every inductive inference, an act of invention is requisite, the act soon slips out of notice. Although we bind together facts by superinducing upon them a new Conception, this Conception, once introduced and applied, is looked upon as inseparably connected with the facts, and necessarily implied in them. Having once had the phenomena bound together in their minds in virtue of the Conception men can no longer easily restore them back to the detached and incoherent condition in which they were before they were thus combined. The pearls once strung, they seem to form a chain by their nature. Induction has given them unity which it is so far from costing us an effort to preserve, that it requires an effort to imagine it dissolved — William Whewell, 1858. (Quoted from Butts (ed.), 1989, p. 143)