How Accurate are Recruiters' First Impressions of Applicants in Employment Interviews?

The ability of recruiters and laypersons (students) to detect applicant personality traits and deception was studied. Participants viewed mock videotapes of target applicants answering interview questions. They subsequently judged the applicants' personality on the Big Five dimensions. Then, they viewed another videotape with other applicants presenting themselves either truthfully or not, and subsequently guessed which version was truthful. Personality judgments were compared with targets' self‐assessments and peer assessments to create an accuracy score. Both recruiters and students accurately detected applicants' global personality profile. Recruiters were better at this than students. However, students were better at judging the specific traits of openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness, whereas recruiters only accurately detected openness. Recruiters detected lies above chance whereas students did not.     

Distinct and shared cognitive functions mediate event- and time-based prospective memory impairment in normal ageing

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an action at a specific point in the future. Regarded as multidimensional, PM involves several cognitive functions that are known to be impaired in normal ageing. In the present study we set out to investigate the cognitive correlates of PM impairment in normal ageing. Manipulating cognitive load, we assessed event- and time-based PM, as well as several cognitive functions, including executive functions, working memory, and retrospective episodic memory, in healthy participants covering the entire adulthood. We found that normal ageing was characterised by PM decline in all conditions and that event-based PM was more sensitive to the effects of ageing than time-based PM. Whatever the conditions, PM was linked to inhibition and processing speed. However, while event-based PM was mainly mediated by binding and retrospective memory processes, time-based PM was mainly related to inhibition. The only distinction between high- and low-load PM cognitive correlates lies in an additional, but marginal, correlation between updating and the high-load PM condition. The association of distinct cognitive functions, as well as shared mechanisms with event- and time-based PM, confirm that each type of PM relies on a different set of processes.     

But for the bad, there would not be good: Grounding valence in brightness through shared relational structures

Light and dark are used pervasively to represent positive and negative concepts. Recent studies suggest that black and white stimuli are automatically associated with negativity and positivity. However, structural factors in experimental designs, such as the shared opposition in the valence (good vs. bad) and brightness (light vs. dark) dimensions might play an important role in the valence-brightness association. In 6 experiments, we show that while black ideographs are consistently judged to represent negative words, white ideographs represent positivity only when the negativity of black is coactivated. The positivity of white emerged only when brightness and valence were manipulated within participants (but not between participants) or when the negativity of black was perceptually activated by presenting positive and white stimuli against a black (vs. gray) background. These findings add to an emerging literature on how structural overlap between dimensions creates associations and highlight the inherently contextualized construction of meaning structures.     

Motivated use of information about others: Linking the 2 × 2 achievement goal model to social comparison propensities and processes

The present research used correlational and experimental methods and two well-established social comparison paradigms to integrate and extend prior research from the achievement goal and social comparison literatures. In Study 1, a general disposition to engage in social comparison was positively correlated with each type of goal in the 2 × 2 model of achievement goals, suggesting that the desire to seek out social comparison information is not exclusive to a particular type of achievement goal pursuit. In Study 2, when evaluating the specific direction of social comparison (upward or downward), the pursuit of performance-approach, mastery-approach, and mastery-avoidance goals facilitated upward social comparison, and the pursuit of performance-avoidance goals prompted a shift away from upward comparison towards downward comparison. The present findings provide new insight to the emerging integration of achievement goals and social comparison.     

Relevance-driven information search in "pseudodiagnostic" reasoning

When faced with two competing hypotheses, people sometimes prefer to look at multiple sources of information in support of one hypothesis rather than to establish the diagnostic value of a single piece of information for the two hypotheses. This is termed pseudodiagnostic reasoning and has often been understood to reflect, among other things, poor information search strategies. Past research suggests that diagnostic reasoning may be more easily fostered when participants seek data to help in the selection of one of two competing courses of action as opposed to situations where they seek data to help infer which of two competing hypotheses is true. In the experiment reported here, we provide the first empirical evidence demonstrating that manipulating the relevance of the feature for which participants initially receive information determines whether they will make a nominally diagnostic or pseudodiagnostic selection. The discussion of these findings focuses on implications for the ability to engage in diagnostic hypothesis testing.     

Visual search for global/local stimulus features in humans and baboons

Fagot and Deruelle (1997) demonstrated that, when tested with identical visual stimuli, baboons exhibit an advantage in processing local features, whereas humans show the “global precedence” effect initially reported by Navon (1977). In the present experiments, we investigated the cause of this species difference. Humans and baboons performed a visual search task in which the target differed from the distractors at either the global or the local level. Humans responded more quickly to global than to local targets, whereas baboons did the opposite (Experiment 1). Human response times (RTs) were independent of display size, for both local and global processing. Baboon RTs increased linearly with display size, more so for global than for local processing. The search slope for baboons disappeared for continuous targets (Experiment 2). That effect was not due to variations in stimulus luminance (Experiment 3). Finally, variations in stimulus density affected global search slopes in baboons but not in humans (Experiment 4). Overall, results suggest that perceptual grouping operations involved during the processing of hierarchical stimuli are attention demanding for baboons, but not for humans.     

Associative learning in baboons (Papio papio) and humans (Homo sapiens): species differences in learned attention to visual features

We examined attention shifting in baboons and humans during the learning of visual categories. Within a conditional matching-to-sample task, participants of the two species sequentially learned two two-feature categories which shared a common feature. Results showed that humans encoded both features of the initially learned category, but predominantly only the distinctive feature of the subsequently learned category. Although baboons initially encoded both features of the first category, they ultimately retained only the distinctive features of each category. Empirical data from the two species were analyzed with the 1996 ADIT connectionist model of Kruschke. ADIT fits the baboon data when the attentional shift rate is zero, and the human data when the attentional shift rate is not zero. These empirical and modeling results suggest species differences in learned attention to visual features. Received: 30 May 1998 / Accepted after revision: 13 September 1998     

Die Entstehung einer personalistischen Philosophie im heutigen Russland

Ohne ZusammenfassungText eines Vortrages an einem Kolloquium den 24 Mai, 1992 zu Ehren von Prof. Joseph M. Bochenski an Lässlich seines 90. Geburtstags.