Climate perceptions matter: a meta-analytic path analysis relating molar climate,cognitive and affective states,and individual level work outcomes

Although workplace climate has been extensively studied, the research has not led to firm conclusions as to its relationship with individual level work outcomes. The authors used C. Ostroff's (1993) taxonomy to organize dimensions labeled as workplace climate and then used meta-analytic techniques to test a path analytic model. The model posited that climate affects individual level outcomes through its impact on underlying cognitive and affective states. An extensive literature search yielded 51 empirical studies with 70 samples. The results suggest that the 3 higher order facets of climate (affective, cognitive, and instrumental) affected individual level outcomes of job performance, psychological well-being, and withdrawal through their impact on organizational commitment and job satisfaction.     

The one-of-us effect in decision evaluation

Judgment-by-outcomes denotes basing retrospective evaluation of decisions on the valence of their outcomes (success versus failure). Although decisions are typically evaluated in social contexts, so far judgment-by-outcomes has been studied without regard to this context. This study examines the moderating effect of evaluator's identification with the decision maker (the one-of-us-effect) on the influence of outcome information on the evaluation of Arab and Jewish subjects were presented with two cases recounting operations by either Arab or Jewish underground directed against the British authorities in Palestine. One case was a success (from the underground's point of view) and one ended in failure. Consistent with the one-of-us effect, identification with the decision maker variably canceled the influence of outcome information altogether, accentuated or weakened its influence, or determined which outcome constituted successful and unsuccessful outcomes. The one-of-us effect exercised a differential influence over different facets of decision evaluation, influencing most strongly the assignment of sanctions (in-group decision makers were mostly rewarded, out-group decision-makers were mostly punished regardless of outcomes). Next, in order of potency, the effect influenced the evaluation of decision justification, the evaluation of the decision maker, and the evaluation of the quality of decision process.     

Lexical input as related to children's vocabulary acquisition: effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning

A corpus of nearly 150,000 maternal word-tokens used by 53 low-income mothers in 263 mother-child conversations in 5 settings (e.g., play, mealtime, and book readings) was studied. Ninety-nine percent of maternal lexical input consisted of the 3,000 most frequent words. Children's vocabulary performance in kindergarten and later in 2nd grade related more to the occurrence of sophisticated lexical items than to quantity of lexical input overall. Density of sophisticated words heard and the density with which such words were embedded in helpful or instructive interactions, at age 5 at home, independently predicted over a third of the variance in children's vocabulary performance in both kindergarten and 2nd grade. These two variables, with controls for maternal education, child nonverbal IQ, and amount of child's talk produced during the interactive settings, at age 5, predicted 50% of the variance in children's 2nd-grade vocabulary.     

Visual indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision

This paper argues that a theory of situated vision, suited for the dual purposes of object recognition and the control of action, will have to provide something more than a system that constructs a conceptual representation from visual stimuli: it will also need to provide a special kind of direct (preconceptual, unmediated) connection between elements of a visual representation and certain elements in the world. Like natural language demonstratives (such as 'this' or 'that') this direct connection allows entities to be referred to without being categorized or conceptualized. Several reasons are given for why we need such a preconceptual mechanism which individuates and keeps track of several individual objects in the world. One is that early vision must pick out and compute the relation among several individual objects while ignoring their properties. Another is that incrementally computing and updating representations of a dynamic scene requires keeping track of token individuals despite changes in their properties or locations. It is then noted that a mechanism meeting these requirements has already been proposed in order to account for a number of disparate empirical phenomena, including subitizing, search-subset selection and multiple object tracking (Pylyshyn et al., Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 48(2) (1994) 260). This mechanism, called a visual index or FINST, is briefly discussed and it is argued that viewing it as performing a demonstrative or preconceptual reference function has far-reaching implications not only for a theory of situated vision, but also for suggesting a new way to look at why the primitive individuation of visual objects, or proto-objects, is so central in computing visual representations. Indexing visual objects is also, according to this view, the primary means for grounding visual concepts and is a potentially fruitful way to look at the problem of visual integration across time and across saccades, as well as to explain how infants' numerical capacity might arise.     

Sequential priming of 3-D perceptual organization

In four experiments, the effects of sequential priming on the perceptual organization of complex three-dimensional (3-D) displays were examined. Observers were asked to view stereoscopic arrays and to search an embedded subset of items for an odd-colored target while 3-D orientation of the stimuli was varied randomly between trials. Search times decreased reliably when 3-D stimulus orientation was unchanged on consecutive trials, indicating substantial sequential priming by 3-D stimulus layout. The priming was nonsensory and was independent of priming by additional stimulus characteristics. Finally, priming by 3-D layout was unaffected by observers' foreknowledge of display orientation. Results indicate that perceptual organization of 3-D stimuli is guided by a short-term trace of 3-D spatial relationships between stimuli.     

Effects of accelerated reading rate on syntactic processing of Hebrew sentences: electrophysiological evidence

The present study was designed to investigate whether accelerated reading rate influences the way adult readers process sentence components with different grammatical functions. Participants were 20 male native Hebrew-speaking college students aged 18-27 years. The processing of normal word strings was examined during word-by-word reading of sentences having subject-verb-object (SVO) syntactic structure in self-paced and fast-paced conditions. In both reading conditions, the N100 (late positive) and P300 (late negative) event-related potential (ERP) components were sensitive to such internal processes as recognition of words' syntactic functions. However, an accelerated reading rate influenced the way in which readers processed these sentence elements. In the self-paced condition, the predicate-centered (morphologically based) strategy was used, whereas in the fast-paced condition an approach that was more like the word-order strategy was used. This new pattern was correlated with findings on the shortening of latency and the increasing of amplitudes in both N100 and P300 ERP components for most sentence elements. These changes seemed to be related to improved working memory functioning and maximized attention.     

The Age and Gender Effect on Four Forms of Peer Victimization among Chinese Children and Adolescents

Applied Research in Quality of Life - This study is the first to examine the effects of age and gender on different forms of peer victimization among local Chinese schoolchildren in Hong Kong. The...     

Experience-guided attention: Uniform and implicit

Frequently finding a visual search target in one region of space induces a spatial attentional bias toward that region. Past studies on this effect typically tested fewer than 20 participants. The small sample prevents an investigation of two properties of learning: visual field uniformity and role of explicit awareness. Pooling data from multiple studies, here we examined location probability learning from ~120,000 visual search trials across 420 participants. Participants performed a serial search task. Unbeknownst to them, the target was disproportionately likely to appear in one visual quadrant. Location probability learning (LPL) was measured as the difference in reaction time to targets in the high-probability “rich” quadrant and the low-probability “sparse” quadrants. Results showed a lack of visual field effect. LPL was equivalent for “rich” quadrant in the upper left, upper right, lower left, and lower right. Learning did not induce a hotspot diagonal to the “rich” quadrant. To the contrary, RT was the longest in the diagonal quadrant. Recognition rate of the “rich” quadrant was above chance. However, recognition accuracy was unrelated to the size of LPL. Implicit learning induces visual-field-independent changes in spatial attention.