Integration of temporal and ordinal information during serial interception sequence learning

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements. Research examining incidental sequence learning has relied on a perceptually cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. In the 1st experiment, a novel perceptual-motor sequence learning task was used, and learning a precisely timed cued sequence of motor actions was shown to occur without explicit instruction. Participants learned a repeating sequence through practice and showed sequence-specific knowledge via a performance decrement when switched to an unfamiliar sequence. In the 2nd experiment, the integration of representation of action order and timing sequence knowledge was examined. When either action order or timing sequence information was selectively disrupted, performance was reduced to levels similar to completely novel sequences. Unlike prior sequence-learning research that has found timing information to be secondary to learning action sequences, when the task demands require accurate action and timing information, an integrated representation of these types of information is acquired. These results provide the first evidence for incidental learning of fully integrated action and timing sequence information in the absence of an independent representation of action order and suggest that this integrative mechanism may play a material role in the acquisition of complex motor skills.     

Performing the unexplainable: Implicit task performance reveals individually reliable sequence learning without explicit knowledge

Memory-impaired patients express intact implicit perceptual-motor sequence learning, but it has been difficult to obtain a similarly clear dissociation in healthy participants. When explicit memory is intact, participants acquire some explicit knowledge and performance improvements from implicit learning may be subtle. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether performance exceeds what could be expected on the basis of the concomitant explicit knowledge. Using a challenging new sequence-learning task, robust implicit learning was found in healthy participants with virtually no associated explicit knowledge. Participants trained on a repeating sequence that was selected randomly from a set of five. On a performance test of all five sequences, performance was best on the trained sequence, and two-thirds of the participants exhibited individually reliable improvement (by chi-square analysis). Participants could not reliably indicate which sequence had been trained by either recognition or recall. Only by expressing their knowledge via performance were participants able to indicate which sequence they had learned.     

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting

We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue—a hand or an eye—or due to its social relevance—a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue‐target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue—whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing—and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance.     

Klaus B: The success story of an entrepreneur - a case study

Interorganizational teams are rapidly becoming more prevalent as a means to improve organizations' responsiveness. To achieve their objective, interorganizational teams must engage in extensive amounts of boundary spanning activity. This study juxtaposed three structural variables, namely team informational diversity, team boundedness, and extrateam links, in an integrated model aimed at promoting our understanding of how to increase interorganizational team boundary spanning activity and its effectiveness. The model was tested with 49 health promotion teams. Our findings indicated that three types of boundary spanning—scouting, ambassadorial, and coordinating—were positively associated with interorganizational team effectiveness. In addition, for team informational diversity, team boundedness, and extrateam links, scouting and ambassadorial activities fully mediated their relationships with team effectiveness; for team boundedness, coordinating activity also fully mediated its relationship with team effectiveness. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating structural considerations into the management of interorganizational teams.