Cognitive Offloading: Structuring the Environment to Improve Children's Working Memory Task Performance

Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.     

I Can't Relax! You're Driving me Quasi!

Robust Realists think that there are irreducible, non‐natural, and mind‐independent moral properties. Quasi‐Realists and Relaxed Realists think the same, but interpret these commitments differently. Robust Realists interpret them as metaphysical commitments, to be defended by metaphysical argument. Quasi‐Realists and Relaxed Realists say that they can only be interpreted as moral commitments. These theories thus pose a serious threat to Robust Realism, for they apparently undermine the very possibility of articulating the robust metaphysical commitments of this theory. I clarify and respond to this threat, showing that there is in fact space to develop and defend a robust moral ontology.     

The Nature of Psychological Reactance Revisited: A Meta‐Analytic Review

Psychological reactance ( Brehm, 1966 ; Brehm & Brehm, 1981 ) has been a long‐standing topic of interest among scholars studying the design and effects of persuasive messages and campaigns. Yet, until recently, reactance was considered to be a motivational state that could not be measured. Dillard and Shen (2005) argued that reactance can be conceptualized as cognition and affect and made amenable to direct measurement. This article revisits Dillard and Shen's (2005) questions about the nature of psychological reactance and reports a test designed to identify the best fitting model of reactance. A meta‐analytic review of reactance research was conducted (K = 20, N = 4,942) and the results were used to test path models representing competing conceptualizations of reactance. The results offer evidence that the intertwined model—in which reactance is modeled as a latent factor with anger and counterarguments serving as indicators—best fit the data.     

THE EVOLVING MANAGER STEREOTYPE: THE EFFECTS OF INDUSTRY GENDER TYPING ON PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS FOR LEADERS AND THEIR TEAMS

This study examined how external evaluators' assessments of a management team and its leader are impacted by congruence between the leader's gender and the gender typing of the industry in which the team works. We experimentally tested our theory using industries that are either male typed or gender neutral, with teams led by male and female leaders. Results indicate that performance expectations for the team were more favorable when the leader's gender was congruent with the industry's gender typing, but expectations for the leader were not affected by gender congruence. These findings paradoxically suggest that evaluators form performance expectations for teams based upon individual characteristics of their leaders, even when these characteristics have no effect on the conscious assessments of the leaders themselves.