The relationship between high performance and knowledge about how to master cooperation situations

This paper applies the expertise approach to cooperation settings and examines high performers' knowledge about cooperation situations. We argue that high performers know more about how to address cooperation situations than do moderate performers. Specifically, we assume that they know more about problem analysis, about how to address the task, the cooperation partner and the cooperation partners' task approach. We report findings of two empirical studies in which study participants responded to scenario situations. The first study based on a sample of 39 software professionals showed that high performers were superior with respect to overall knowledge and specific knowledge aspects. The second study based on a sample of 62 engineers partially replicated these findings. High performers' better knowledge of cooperation situations could not be explained by years of experience or perspective taking. However, situation‐specific experiences partially accounted for the relationship between performance level and knowledge. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interlimb coordination: Learning and transfer under different feedback conditions

The role of intrinsic and extrinsic information feedback in learning a new bimanual coordination pattern was investigated. The pattern required continuous flexion-extension movements of the upper limbs with a 90 ° phase offset. Separate groups practiced the task under one of the following visual feedback conditions: (a) blindfolded (reduced FB group), (b) with normal vision (normal FB group), or (c) with concurrent relative motion information (enhanced FB group). All groups were subjected to three different transfer test conditions at regular intervals during practice. These tests included reduced, normal vision, and enhanced vision conditions. Experiment 1 showed that the group receiving augmented information feedback about its relative motions in real-time produced the required coordination pattern more successfully than the remaining two groups, irrespective of the transfer conditions under which performance was evaluated. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the superiority of the enhanced feedback group during acquisition and retention. Experiment 3 demonstrated that successful transfer to various transfer test conditions was not a result of test-trial effects. Overall, the data suggest that the conditions that optimized performance of the coordination pattern during acquisition also optimized transfer performance.     

Child Age and Planum Temporale Asymmetry

Investigations using in vivo magnetic resonance (MR) morphometry have shown that left-right asymmetry of the planum temporale (PT) is a structural correlate of hemispheric functional asymmetries in adult humans (e.g., handedness, language representation). Postmortem studies of brains of fetuses and newborns have demonstrated that PT asymmetry becomes visible as early as in the last gestational trimester. The same studies could not clarify when the full (adult) degree of PT asymmetry is reached during brain development and whether this process may be influenced by functional specialization during childhood. We examined 61 neuropsychiatrically normal right-handed children aged 3 to 14 years (mean age +/-SD, 8.4 +/- 2. 7 years; cross-sectional study). MR morphometry showed no change in PT or planum parietale asymmetry with increasing age or brain volume. An unexpected gender difference of unknown significance emerged, with girls displaying a stronger leftward PT asymmetry, independently of age. For the age range studied, the results suggest that functional differentiation follows a structural asymmetry that is already "preset." Copyright 1999 Academic Press.     

Use of punctuation for pausing: Oral readings by German radio homilists

Summary Use of punctuation for pausing was investigated in a corpus of 20 German radio homilies by four speakers. Punctuation accounted for 91% of pause time and 84% of pause frequency in oral readings. Relative duration of pauses was according to punctuation type, as hypothesized. Pausing was also, as hypothesized, universal at paragraph positions and minimal at unpunctuated (null) positions. Commas accounted for 95% of the punctuated positions not used for pausing. Variation across speakers in the use of punctuation (commas in particular) in both writing and reading is interpreted as reflecting individual style. The viewpoint that syntactic analysis is a prerequisite for pausing in oral reading is discussed.The first author wishes to express his gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bad Godesberg, West Germany, for the support of this project. A preliminary version was reported at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 23, 1985, Boston, MA     

The Research Status of Clayman and Heritage’s (2002) The News Interview

The databases of three books with almost identical titles are examined in order to throw light on the theory of neutralistic professionalism of news interviewers and on the empirical logic of the most recent of the three: The news interview by Steven Clayman and John Heritage (2002). Instead of a theory of neutralism, a theory of perspectivity that applies to both interviewer and interviewee is presented. The logic of Clayman and Heritage’s arguments is found wanting in a number of respects: (a) their treatment of TV and radio interviews as if they were identical; (b) their treatment of news interviews in the United States and Great Britain as essentially the same in practices and ground rules; (c) their inferences from isolated excerpts to the structure of the news interview itself; (d) their very concept of the news interview as “an interactional encounter between a journalist and one or more newsworthy public figures” (p. 1). Inaccuracies in their database make it unsatisfactory as support for a theory of neutralistic professionalism. Despite these limitations, Clayman and Heritage provide an excellent overview of the recent history of the news interview in the United States and Britain and a wealth of information about the local organization of news interviews.     

Automatic negative evaluation of suffocation sensations in individuals with suffocation fear

The current study tested whether "suffocation sensations" (respiratory loads) are automatically evaluated in a negative way by people fearing these sensations. It was found that, after having been primed with a slight respiratory load, participants with high suffocation fear (n=15) reacted more quickly to suffocation words and more slowly to positive words than participants with low suffocation fear (n=21). However, the effect was present only in participants who had noticed the primes. The findings are relevant to the cognitive model of panic disorder because automatic negative appraisal of sensations may play a role in initiating a panic attack.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Uh</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Um</Emphasis> Revisited: Are They Interjections for Signaling Delay?

Clark and Fox Tree (2002) have presented empirical evidence, based primarily on the London–Lund corpus (LL; Svartvik & Quirk, 1980), that the fillers uh and um are conventional English words that signal a speaker’s intention to initiate a minor and a major delay, respectively. We present here empirical analyses of uh and um and of silent pauses (delays) immediately following them in six media interviews of Hillary Clinton. Our evidence indicates that uh and um cannot serve as signals of upcoming delay, let alone signal it differentially: In most cases, both uh and um were not followed by a silent pause, that is, there was no delay at all; the silent pauses that did occur after um were too short to be counted as major delays; finally, the distributions of durations of silent pauses after uh and um were almost entirely overlapping and could therefore not have served as reliable predictors for a listener. The discrepancies between Clark and Fox Tree’s findings and ours are largely a consequence of the fact that their LL analyses reflect the perceptions of professional coders, whereas our data were analyzed by means of acoustic measurements with the PRAAT software (www.praat.org). A comparison of our findings with those of O’Connell, Kowal, and Ageneau (2005) did not corroborate the hypothesis of Clark and Fox Tree that uh and um are interjections: Fillers occurred typically in initial, interjections in medial positions; fillers did not constitute an integral turn by themselves, whereas interjections did; fillers never initiated cited speech, whereas interjections did; and fillers did not signal emotion, whereas interjections did. Clark and Fox Tree’s analyses were embedded within a theory of ideal delivery that we find inappropriate for the explication of these phenomena.     

Interjections in Interviews

A psycholinguistic hypothesis regarding the use of interjections in spoken utterances, originally formulated by Ameka (1992b, 1994) for the English language, but not confirmed in the German-language research of Kowal and OConnell (2004 a & c), was tested: The local syntactic isolation of interjections is paralleled by their articulatory isolation in spoken utterances, i.e., by their occurrence between a preceding and a following pause. The corpus consisted of four TV and two radio interviews of Hillary Clinton that had coincided with the publication of her book Living History (2003) and one TV interview of Robin Williams by James Lipton. No evidence was found for articulatory isolation of English-language interjections. In the Hillary Clinton interviews and Robin Williams interviews, respectively, 71% and 73% of all interjections occurred initially, i.e., at the onset of various units of spoken discourse: at the beginning of turns; at the beginning of articulatory phrases within turns, i.e., after a preceding pause; and at the beginning of a citation within a turn (either Direct Reported Speech [DRS] or what we have designated Hypothetical Speaker Formulation [HSF]. One conventional interjection (OH) occurred most frequently. The Robin Williams interview had a much higher occurrence of interjections, especially nonconventional ones, than the Hillary Clinton interviews had. It is suggested that the onset or initializing role of interjections reflects the temporal priority of the affective and the intuitive over the analytic, grammatical, and cognitive in speech production. Both this temporal priority and the spontaneous and emotional use of interjections are consonant with Wundts (1900) characterization of the primary interjection as psychologically primitive. The interjection is indeed the purest verbal implementation of conceptual orality.     

Robustness of the rule-learning effect in 7-month-old infants: A close,multicenter replication of Marcus et al. (1999)

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus and colleagues from 1999, which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, 7-month-old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we assume that infants are able to learn abstract representations and generalize linguistic rules. While some extensions on the original work have shown evidence of rule learning, the outcomes are mixed, and an exact replication of Marcus et al.'s study has thus far not been reported. A recent meta-analysis by Rabagliati and colleagues brings to light that the rule-learning effect depends on stimulus type (e.g., meaningfulness, speech vs. nonspeech) and is not as robust as often assumed. In light of the theoretical importance of the issue at stake, it is appropriate and necessary to assess the replicability and robustness of Marcus et al.'s findings. Here we have undertaken a replication across four labs with a large sample of 7-month-old infants (N = 96), using the same exposure patterns (ABA and ABB), methodology (Headturn Preference Paradigm), and original stimuli. As in the original study, we tested the hypothesis that infants are able to learn abstract “algebraic” rules and apply them to novel input. Our results did not replicate the original findings: infants showed no difference in looking time between test patterns consistent or inconsistent with the familiarization pattern they were exposed to.     

Footsteps I would like to follow? How gender quotas affect the acceptance of women leaders as role models and inspirations for leadership

This research examines how the method of selecting women leaders affects other women's leadership interest. The results of three experiments (N = 1,015) indicated that only when women leaders were selected due to merit, not quota-based policies, did they boost female participants’ interest in a leadership position. These reactions were mediated by perceptions of the woman leader's deservingness of her position (Studies 1–3) and consequent acceptance as a role model (Studies 2 and 3). Accordingly, success information validating quota-based selected leaders’ competence provided a boost in leadership interest equal to that of merit-based selected leaders (Study 2). For male participants, quota but not merit-based selected women leaders lowered interest in leadership due to their pessimistic assessment of the probability of being selected (Study 1). These results suggest that a wise implementation of quota regulations includes validating women's competence so they are perceived as deserving of their leader roles and can thus serve as inspiring role models.