Segmentation of input in simultaneous translation

This paper examines the events of the simultaneous translation situation. Parallel visual records of the input speech and of the interpreter's speech were used to investigate what is the length and nature of the segment which the interpreter needs to monitor before he can start encoding. The results suggest that lexical and grammatical aspects of the text, as well as the interpreter's subjective organization of the material, interplayed in a systematic fashion.This investigation was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council, London.     

The Interrupted Managerial Career Path: A Longitudinal Study of MBAs

The view of managerial career success as an uninterrupted climb up the corporate ladder no longer fits the realities of many managers. This study examined longitudinal data on the career paths of MBAs to determine the consequences of early- and mid-career gaps on career success. The study found that early gaps have a negative impact on income and management level. Gaps in mid-career also reveal an income penalty, even after controlling for pre-gap income. In mid-career, the negative level effect was found for women, but not for men. MBAs with discontinuous employment histories, however, did not have diminished career satisfaction. The research suggests the need for researchers, organizations, managers, and business schools to broaden the definition of acceptable managerial career paths.     

Philosophy in Poland: Varieties of Anti-Irrationalism. A Commitment to Reason without the Worship of Reason

Philosophia - I shall elaborate more on the idea of anti-irrationalism proposed by the Polish analytic philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, a prominent member of the Lvov-Warsaw School of philosophy...     

Adults’ perception of native and nonnative vowels: Implications for the perceptual magnet effect

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the perceptual magnet effect. In Experiment 1, Amer-ican English speakers representing diverse dialects were presented with a fine-grained set of stimuli (varying in just noticeable differences forF1 andF2) and indicated whether they heard “/i/” or “not /i/,” thus delimiting the /i/ portion of the vowel space for individual subjects. Then these same subjects selected their own /i/ prototype with a method-of-adjustment procedure. The data from this experiment were used to synthesize customized prototype and nonprototype stimulus sets for Experiment 2. In Experiment 2,24 of our original 37 subjects completed a discrimination task for each of three conditions, in which vector stimuli varied from the subject’s prototype, the nonprototype, or a foreign vowel (/y/) in 15-mel steps. Subjects displayed higher discrimination, as indexed byd′, for the nonprototype condition than they did for both the prototype and the foreign conditions. In addition, discrimination was better for variants further away from the referent in each condition. However, discrimination was not especially poor for stimuli close to subjects’ individual prototypes—a result that would have yielded the strongest support for the operation of a magnet effect. This negative finding, together with other aspects of our results, raises problems for any theory of vowel perception that relies solely on “one-size-fits-all” prototype representations.     

Higher Levels of Psychopathy Predict Poorer Motor Control: Implications for Understanding the Psychopathy Construct

A review of the literature suggests that higher levels of psychopathy may be linked to less effective behavioral control. However, several commentators have urged caution in making statements of this type in the absence of direct evidence. In two studies (total N?=?142), moment-to-moment accuracy in a motor control task was examined as a function of dimensional variations in psychopathy in an undergraduate population. As hypothesized, motor control was distinctively worse at higher levels of psychopathy relative to lower levels, both as a function of primary and secondary psychopathy and particularly their shared variance. These novel findings provide support for the idea that motor control systematically varies by psychopathy, in a basic manner, consistent with views of psychopathy emphasizing lesser control.     

Employing automatic approach and avoidance tendencies for the assessment of implicit personality self-concept: The implicit association procedure (IAP)

A new chronometric procedure, the Implicit Association Procedure (IAP), was adapted to assess the implicit personality self-concept of shyness. A sample of 300 participants completed a shyness-inducing role play and, before or after the role play, a shyness IAP, a shyness Implicit Association Test (IAT), and direct self-ratings. The experimental group was instructed to fake nonshyness. The control group did not receive this instruction. IAT and IAP were unaffected by position effects, and were less susceptible to faking than direct self-ratings with regard to mean levels and correlates. Under faking, correlations between direct and indirect measures decreased, and direct but not indirect measures showed higher correlations with social desirability and lower correlations with observed shyness. Despite many similarities, the true correlation between IAT and IAP was estimated only .61, indicating high method-specific variance in both procedures. The findings suggest that indirect measures are more robust against faking than traditional self-ratings but do not yet meet psychometric criteria for practical assessment purposes.     

Neurocognitive Performance in Children with ADHD and OCD

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) have both been linked to dysfunction in the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuitry (CSTCC). However, the exact nature of neurocognitive deficits remains to be investigated in both disorders. We applied two neuropsychological tasks that tap into different functions associated with the CSTCC, namely a serial reaction time (SRT) task, developed to assess implicit sequence learning, and a delay aversion (DA) task in order to assess abnormal motivational processes. The performance data of boys with ADHD (n = 20), OCD (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 25), all aged 10–18 years, were compared. Subjects with ADHD less frequently chose the larger, more delayed reward compared to those with OCD and controls, while subjects with OCD showed impaired implicit learning. In contrast, the ADHD group was unimpaired in their implicit learning behavior and the OCD group was not characterized by a DA style. Within the OCD-group, severity of obsessions was associated with implicit learning deficits and impulsive symptoms with DA in the ADHD-group. This double dissociation highlights the distinct cognitive dysfunctions associated with ADHD and OCD and might possibly point to different neural abnormalities in both disorders.     

Gender differences in implicit and explicit personality traits

This article investigates gender differences in implicit and explicit measures of the Big Five traits of personality. In a high-powered study (N = 14,348), we replicated previous research showing that women report higher levels of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism. For implicit measures, gender differences were much smaller for all, and opposite in sign for Extraversion. Somewhat higher levels of implicit Neuroticism and Agreeableness were observed in women, and somewhat higher levels of implicit Extraversion and Openness were observed in men. There was no gender difference in implicit Conscientiousness. A possible explanation is that explicit self-concepts partly reflect social norms and self-expectations about gender roles, while implicit self-concepts may mostly reflect self-related experiences.