Context and Message Content During Organizational Socialization

This study examined the socialization experiences of 85 newly hired managers over a 4‐month period. Results indicated partial support for a model proposing a mediating relationship among structured and unstructured socialization contexts, socialization message content, and newcomer adjustment. Performance proficiency message content mediated the impact of fixed and serial tactics on role ambiguity while sequential tactics and trial by fire experiences had a direct effect. Investiture tactics were negatively related to new manager role innovation.     

Quantifying latent social motivation and its associations with joint attention and language in infants at high and low likelihood for autism spectrum disorder

Social motivation—the psychobiological predisposition for social orienting, seeking social contact, and maintaining social interaction—manifests in early infancy and is hypothesized to be foundational for social communication development in typical and atypical populations. However, the lack of infant social-motivation measures has hindered delineation of associations between infant social motivation, other early-arising social abilities such as joint attention, and language outcomes. To investigate how infant social motivation contributes to joint attention and language, this study utilizes a mixed longitudinal sample of 741 infants at high (HL = 515) and low (LL = 226) likelihood for ASD. Using moderated nonlinear factor analysis (MNLFA), we incorporated items from parent-report measures to establish a novel latent factor model of infant social motivation that exhibits measurement invariance by age, sex, and familial ASD likelihood. We then examined developmental associations between 6- and 12-month social motivation, joint attention at 12–15 months, and language at 24 months of age. On average, greater social-motivation growth from 6–12 months was associated with greater initiating joint attention (IJA) and trend-level increases in sophistication of responding to joint attention (RJA). IJA and RJA were both positively associated with 24-month language abilities. There were no additional associations between social motivation and future language in our path model. These findings substantiate a novel, theoretically driven approach to modeling social motivation and suggest a developmental cascade through which social motivation impacts other foundational skills. These findings have implications for the timing and nature of intervention targets to support social communication development in infancy.

Highlights

• We describe a novel, theoretically based model of infant social motivation wherein multiple parent-reported indicators contribute to a unitary latent social-motivation factor.
• Analyses revealed social-motivation factor scores exhibited measurement invariance for a longitudinal sample of infants at high and low familial ASD likelihood.
• Social-motivation growth from ages 6–12 months is associated with better 12−15-month joint attention abilities, which in turn are associated with greater 24-month language skills.
• Findings inform timing and targets of potential interventions to support healthy social communication in the first year of life.

     

Causal Information-Seeking Strategies Change Across Childhood and Adolescence

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each puzzle comprised a three- or four-node computer chip with hidden wires. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip's hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures versus those that had high causal centrality in one of the two causal hypotheses but did not necessarily discriminate between them. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. Further, developmental improvements in intervention strategy were related to changes in the ability to accurately judge the strength of evidence that interventions revealed, as indexed by participants' confidence in their selections. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information-seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas.     

Recrafting Youth Risk Assessment: Developing the Modified Positive Achievement Change Tool for Iowa

ABSTRACT

Risk assessments have become prevalent in the juvenile justice field. Many of these tools are adopted off-the-shelf and not adapted to fit the characteristics of a jurisdiction’s justice-involved youth. We examined the Positive Achievement Change Tool (PACT) in Iowa. Although used widely, the PACT is relatively unmodified. We updated the tool via item selection and weighting, gender-specific models and multiple outcomes, developing the Modified Positive Achievement Change Tool (M-PACT) for Iowa. We identified an average predictive accuracy increase of 7%. Evidence of reduced racial disparity was also observed, and research implications outline the need to customize assessments to improve predictive accuracy.     

Show me the meaning! The contextual relevance of images influences the recall and understanding of multimedia RSVP paragraphs

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether images facilitate contextual grouping as effectively as words. College students (N?=?102) read RSVP paragraphs with topics located at the beginning, middle, or end of the paragraph. Paragraph topic was presented as a topic-related image, topic-unrelated image, or written explicitly in text. Topic identification was equally accurate for topic-related images and topic sentences, and less accurate for unrelated images. Paragraphs from the text condition were recalled more accurately than the related and unrelated image conditions. Further, recognition of unrelated images was a positive predictor of the number of logical errors committed during recall. Therefore, related images did not improve memory and comprehension as much as text, and paragraphs with unrelated images negatively affected understanding of the meaning of the paragraph, but not recall. These findings have implications for multimedia information sources such as textbooks or articles that use images to clarify the meaning of the material.     

Relative possibilities of loops and redundant connections in neural nets

A model of the cortex (after Hebb) as a randomly connected set of neurons is examined. As traces made of larger numbers of cells are considered, the fraction of redundant connections likely to be contained in the trace increases. Within the trace, the fraction of connections likely to be reverberating loops decreases with larger networks.