Different Media for Organizational Communication: Perceptions of Quality and Satisfaction

We examined the satisfaction in and perceived quality of information about one’s job, business unit, and company, as well as perceived quality of urgent news (i.e., news about changes in business and generally considered legally sensitive material), communicated via different media. Results from 598 fulltime employees revealed that rich media (e.g., face-to-face) was most related to satisfaction in information about one’s job and business unit and in perceived quality of information from the supervisor; lean media (e.g., company newsletter) was most related to satisfaction in and quality of information from top management, while moderate media (e.g., e-mail) was only significantly related to perceived quality of urgent news. Trust in top management was positively related to satisfaction in and quality of information shared by management. Lean media most strongly related to quality of urgent news, over and above rich communication.The authors would like to thank Monica Moloney for her support on this project.     

Why opening a door is as easy as eating an apple: A reply to Thompson-Schill and Botvinick (2006)

Martin and Cheng (2006) present evidence suggesting that difficulty in verb generation is related to the strength of associative links between nouns and verbs and not to competition from alternative verb responses. Specifically, they show that latencies for verb generation are related to the associative strength of the most frequently produced verb and not to the ratio of the strength of the first to the second most frequently produced verb. Thompson-Schill and Botvinick (2006) have provided modeling results indicating how the findings of Martin and Cheng might be accommodated in a competitive model. Here we discuss how two noncompetitive models account for the findings and why such models should be preferred.     

Influences of grasp selection in typically developing children

When reaching towards an object, adults favour grasps which, following the intended action, end in a comfortable position even when this requires them to start in an uncomfortable position (the end-state-comfort effect). However, this strategy is not consistently used by children who instead seem to favour a minimal pre-contact rotation of the hand, even when this results in an uncomfortable end position. In terms of multiple movements, the strategies used for grip selection are unclear; adults may still grasp for end-state-comfort given their propensity to plan to the end of a movement; however, children who are less able to concatenate movement may tend to start-state-comfort movements. The current study considered grip selection in children ranging from 4 to 12 years and in a group of adults. Participants were asked to rotate a disc so that an arrow pointed towards a specific target(s), the number of sequences in a movement was increased from one to three. Planning for end-state-comfort was seen in all participants and a clear developmental trajectory was identified whereby the relative comfort of an end position could be directly predicted by age in months. Adults and 10–12-year-olds favoured an end-state-comfort strategy whereas the younger children gave equal weighting to end-state-comfort, start-state-comfort and no initial rotation strategies. All groups were able to end a movement comfortably when it was composed of three steps; however, the proportion of movements relying on an end-state-comfort strategy decreased as sequence length increase whereas the proportion of start-state-comfort and no initial rotation strategies increased. The current data support the concept that a mechanism for planning grasps may be based on motor experience.     

Soames on Quine and Davidson

A discussion of Quine and Davidson, as interpreted and criticized in Scott Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II.     

Neonatal physiological regulation is associated with perinatal factors: A study of neonates born to healthy African American women living in poverty

Maternal mental health and prenatal stress are linked with neurobehavioral differences in the offspring. The majority of studies documenting this effect have been conducted using either predominantly European American infants or minority infants exposed to teratogens in utero. In this study, we focus on healthy African American women from low‐income environments to investigate the earliest individual differences in biobehavioral regulation, including resting heart rate and variability (HRV). In 87 neonates, HRV was significantly lower in those born to mothers reporting past major depressive disorder (p = .01). The number of maternal life stressors also was associated with lower neonatal HRV (p = .03). Obstetrical complications were not associated with significant differences, but breast‐ versus bottle‐feeding in the first few days of life was related to higher HRV (p = .04). Early variation in physiological regulation may be linked to subsequent individual differences in response to stress. Thus, identifying the earliest point in development when such differences can be reliably measured may result in opportunities for prevention of later deficits in regulating response to stress.     

The Mental Model Theory of Conditionals: A Reply to Guy Politzer

This paper replies to Politzer’s (2007) criticisms of the mental model theory of conditionals. It argues that the theory provides a correct account of negation of conditionals, that it does not provide a truth-functional account of their meaning, though it predicts that certain interpretations of conditionals yield acceptable versions of the ‘paradoxes’ of material implication, and that it postulates three main strategies for estimating the probabilities of conditionals.     

Gestural communication of the gorilla (Gorilla gorilla): repertoire, intentionality and possible origins

Social groups of gorillas were observed in three captive facilities and one African field site. Cases of potential gesture use, totalling 9,540, were filtered by strict criteria for intentionality, giving a corpus of 5,250 instances of intentional gesture use. This indicated a repertoire of 102 gesture types. Most repertoire differences between individuals and sites were explicable as a consequence of environmental affordances and sampling effects: overall gesture frequency was a good predictor of universality of occurrence. Only one gesture was idiosyncratic to a single individual, and was given only to humans. Indications of cultural learning were few, though not absent. Six gestures appeared to be traditions within single social groups, but overall concordance in repertoires was almost as high between as within social groups. No support was found for the ontogenetic ritualization hypothesis as the chief means of acquisition of gestures. Many gestures whose form ruled out such an origin, i.e. gestures derived from species-typical displays, were used as intentionally and almost as flexibly as gestures whose form was consistent with learning by ritualization. When using both classes of gesture, gorillas paid specific attention to the attentional state of their audience. Thus, it would be unwarranted to divide ape gestural repertoires into ‘innate, species-typical, inflexible reactions’ and ‘individually learned, intentional, flexible communication’. We conclude that gorilla gestural communication is based on a species-typical repertoire, like those of most other mammalian species but very much larger. Gorilla gestures are not, however, inflexible signals but are employed for intentional communication to specific individuals.     

Spider monkey ranging patterns in Mexican subtropical forest: do travel routes reflect planning?

Although it is well known that frugivorous spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi yucatanensis) occupy large home ranges, travelling long distances to reach highly productive resources, little is known of how they move between feeding sites. A 11 month study of spider monkey ranging patterns was carried out at the Otochma’ax Yetel Kooh reserve, Yucatán, Mexico. We followed single individuals for as long as possible each day and recorded the routes travelled with the help of a GPS (Global Positioning System) device; the 11 independently moving individuals of a group were targeted as focal subjects. Travel paths were composed of highly linear segments, each typically ending at a place where some resource was exploited. Linearity of segments did not differ between individuals, and most of the highly linear paths that led to food resources were much longer than the estimate visibility in the woodland canopy. Monkeys do not generally continue in the same ranging direction after exploiting a resource: travel paths are likely to deviate at the site of resource exploitation rather than between such sites. However, during the harshest months of the year consecutive route segments were more likely to retain the same direction of overall movement. Together, these findings suggest that while moving between feeding sites, spider monkeys use spatial memory to guide travel, and even plan more than one resource site in advance. This contribution is part of the special issue “A Socioecological Perspective on Primate Cognition” (Cunningham and Janson 2007).