Nascent entrepreneurship and the developing individual: Early entrepreneurial competence in adolescence and venture creation success during the career

What predicts a person's venture creation success over the course of the career, such as making progress in the venture creation process and multiple successful venture creations? Applying a life span approach of human development, this study examined the effect of early entrepreneurial competence in adolescence, which was gathered retrospectively by means of the Life History Calendar method. Human and social capitals during the founding process were investigated as mediators between adolescent competence and performance. Findings were derived from regression analyses on the basis of prospective and retrospective data from two independent samples (N = 88 nascent founders; N = 148 founders). We found that early entrepreneurial competence in adolescence had a positive effect on making progress in the venture creation process. Nascent founders' current human and social capital also had a direct effect, but it did not mediate the effect of early competences. Finally, the data revealed that early entrepreneurial competence in adolescence positively predicted habitual entrepreneurship (multiple successful venture creations) exhibited over a longer period of the individual career (specifically, 18 years). In line with the results from prospective longitudinal studies on early precursors of entrepreneurship, our findings underscore the long neglected importance of adolescent development in the explanation of entrepreneurial performance during the subsequent working life.     

Gender characteristics of cerebral hemodynamics during complex cognitive functioning

Functional Transcranial Doppler sonography (fTCD) has been applied to assess peak mean cerebral blood flow velocity (MFV) with a high temporal resolution during cognitive activation. Yet, little attention has been devoted to gender-related alterations of MFV, including spectral analysis. In healthy subjects, fTCD was used to investigate a series of cerebral hemodynamic parameters in the middle cerebral arteries (MCA) during the Trail Making Tests (TMT), a means of selective attention and complex cognitive functioning. In females, there was a frequency peak at 0.375 Hz in both MCA, and we observed a dynamic shift in hemispheric dominance during that condition. Further, after the start phase, there was an MFV decline during complex functioning for the entire sample. These novel results suggest condition-specific features of cerebral hemodynamics in females, and it adds to the notion that gender is a fundamental confounder of brain physiology.     

Die Ästhetik Oskar Beckers

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A Multinomial Model to Assess Fluency and Recollection in a Sequence Learning Task

We suggest that well-formedness judgements in conjunction with L.L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure and an appropriate measurement model can be used to obtain measures of implicit and explicit sequence knowledge. We introduce a new measurement model designed specifically for the sequence learning task. The model assumes that sequence identification is based on recollection, perceptual or motor fluency, systematicity detection, and guessing. The model and the application of the process dissociation procedure were empirically evaluatedusing auditory eventsequences. In Experiment 1, the parameterreflecting recollection was higher in an intentional than in an incidental learning condition. Experiment 2 showed that random sequences interspersed among the systematic sequences during the acquisition phase may change this pattern of results. A manipulation of processing fluency in Experiment 3 was reflected in the appropriate model parameter. In sum, the new measurement model and the application of the process dissociation procedure appear to be useful tools in sequence learning research.