Intimacy, concreteness, and the "self-reference effect"

Reference to oneself during incidental learning of words frequently results in better recall performance than reference to other persons. However, this effect occurs under different conditions with differing strength, and sometimes it is even reversed. Meta-analyses and further experimental studies suggest that increased recall performance under a self-referential encoding task occurs only if it is compared with a nonintimate other person and if abstract material is presented, irrespective of the type of previously presented words (adjectives or nouns). In the current paper, two experiments are reported which support the assumption that this intimacy effect on memory only occurs if no pictorial or concrete features of the material (nouns) to be learned can be exploited for an improvement in encoding or remembering the material. All results agree with predicted effect sizes, which were drawn from a meta-analysis and subsequently conducted experimental studies. This suggests that a recall advantage of referring to oneself compared to other persons is subordinate to the effects of concreteness or imageability. Moreover, the current results offer a theoretical explanation of some previously reported but nevertheless puzzling results from imagery instructions, which indicate decreased recall performance for self-reference compared to other-reference.     

Priming of mental operations by masked stimuli

Motor responses can be affected by visual stimuli that have been made invisible by masking. Can masked visual stimuli also affect nonmotor operations that are necessary to perform the task? Here, I report priming effects of masked stimuli on operations that were cued by masking stimuli. Cues informed participants about operations that had to be executed with a forthcoming target stimulus. In five experiments, cues indicated (1) the required response, (2) part of the motor response, (3) the stimulus modality of the target stimulus, or (4) the task to be performed on a multidimensional stimulus. Motor and nonmotor priming effects followed comparable time courses, which differed from those of prime recognition. Experiment 5 demonstrated nonmotor priming without prime awareness. Results suggest that motor and nonmotor operations are similarly affected by masked stimuli.     

Neue Medien,neue Forschungsinitiativen

Summary. Two new research programs which are funded by the German Science Foundation are aimed at establishing cognitive media psychology in Germany. The main question of the thematic research program "Net-based Knowledge Communication in Groups" concerns the new forms of communication using net-based technologies and their effective use for the exchange and acquisition of knowledge. Similar questions are posed by the virtual Ph.D. program "Knowledge Acquisition and Exchange with New Media". In contrast to other Ph.D. programs in German this one is not located at a specific place, but distributed over several research institutions all over the country. This setting enables students to collaborate with other tutors and students at the different locations. Zusammenfassung. Mit zwei neuen Förderprogrammen der DFG soll versucht werden, eine kognitionspsychologisch orientierte Medienforschung in Deutschland zu verankern. Im Mittelpunkt des Schwerpunktprogramms "Netzbasierte Wissenskommunikation in Gruppen" steht die Frage, wie sich neue Kommunikationsformen, die durch netzbasierte (computergestützte) Technologien möglich werden, für den Austausch und den Erwerb von Wissen in Gruppen effektiv nutzen lassen. Mit einer ähnlichen Fragestellung befasst sich auch das virtuelle Graduiertenkolleg "Wissenserwerb und Wissensaustausch mit neuen Medien". Im Gegensatz zu anderen Graduiertenkollegs ist es nicht ortsgebunden sondern verteilt über mehrere Forschungsinstitutionen. Es ermöglicht somit eine ortsübergreifende Betreuung und Zusammenarbeit der Kollegiatinnen bzw. Kollegiaten.     

Scientific associations in the German research system—Results of an empirical study

Within contemporary science, scientific associations have been found to fulfill at least four functions: a communicative function that furthers scientific communication within a discipline or subdiscipline; a profesional function that supports individual careers and represents the collective interests of the members within a discipline; a transfer function that provides a meeting place for scientists and societal users of research results; and a promotion function that advises research institutes and political institutions in science policy decisions. This empirical study investigates German scientific associations and shows how and to what degree they fulfill these functions. The results of the study indicate that the communicative and the transfer functions dominate. Uwe Schimank is currently a research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne. He received his doctorate in sociology at the University of Bielefeld. He is presently working on an analysis of the development of extra-university state-financed research institutes in the German research system.     

The Moderating Effect of Raters’ Opportunities to Observe Ratees' Job Performance on the Validity of an Assessment Centre

Previous research has suggested that the quality of judgmental validation criteria may improve depending on the increase of opportunity for the rater to observe ratees’ job performances. This study investigated whether the validity of an assessment centre increases with opportunity to observe. Subjects were engineers and applied scientists from the Research and Development (R&D) units of seven German high-technology companies. A total of 6 personality scales, 10 cognitive ability tests and 9 work samples was administered to 155 subjects. Performance appraisals were collected from their supervisors. Assessors were trained organizational psychologists who were not members of the participating organizations. A total score (‘assessment centre score’) was computed by averaging the 25 predictors after standardization of each predictor. The (uncorrected) validity of this assessment centre was r = 0.37. In addition, opportunity to observe (i.e. amount of time the performance rater was the ratee’s supervisor) emerged as a moderator: for example validities were r = 0.09 (opportunity to observe ≤ 2 years) and r = 0.50 (opportunity to observe> 2 years).     

Motivational control of motor performance by goal setting in a dual-task situation

Summary The goal-setting approach to task motivation is applied to examine the way in which subjects control their performance on two concurrently performed tasks under the guidance of different goals in a dual-task situation. The tasks were a simple auditory-manual reaction time (RT) task and a visual-manual pursuit-tracking task. The goal conditions assigned alternatively to the tasks differed with respect to goal specificity and feedback information (KR) given after the trials. It is shown that the improvement of performance in the task with hard, specific goals is achieved in both cases at the cost of the concurrently performed other task which, on the basis of a lack of feedback and a rather unspecific goal instruction, should have a lower priority. The data reveal some strategies hidden behind these overall changes of the average performance at both tasks. For the RT task, the adjustment to the different goals is mainly achieved by changes in the temporal control or preparatory processes as can be inferred from the RT distributions as well as from the analysis of some typical errors. For the tracking task, changes in the tracking accuracy within the overlapping RT intervals are the best indicators for the performance control under the different goal conditions.This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Kl 408/4-2)