How need for cognition affects the processing of achievement-related information

The present article analyzed, how need for cognition (NFC) influences the formation of performance expectancies. When processing information, individuals with lower NFC often rely on salient information and shortcuts compared to individuals higher in NFC. We assume that these preferences of processing will also make individuals low in NFC more responsive to salient achievement-related cues because the processing of salient cues is cognitively less demanding than the processing of non-salient cues. Therefore, individuals lower in NFC should tend to draw wider ranging inferences from salient achievement-related information. In a sample of N = 197 secondary school students, achievement-related feedback (grade on an English examination) affected changes in expectancies in non-corresponding academic subjects (e.g., expectation of final grade in mathematics or history) when NFC was lower, whereas for students with higher NFC, changes in expectancies in non-corresponding academic subjects were not affected.

I like it because I (‘m) like You – measuring user attitudes towards information on Facebook

Limited in motivation and cognitive ability to process the increasing amount of information on their Newsfeed, users apply heuristic processing to form their attitudes. Rather than extensively analysing the content, they increasingly rely on heuristic cues – such as the amount of comments and likes as well as the level of relationship with the “poster” – to process the incoming information. In the paper we explore what impact these heuristic cues have on the affective and cognitive attitude of users towards the posts on their Newsfeed. We conduct a survey on based on a Facebook application that allows users to evaluate Newsfeed posts in real time. Applying two distinct panel-regression methods we report robust results that indicate that there is a certain relationship primacy effect when users are processing information: only if the level of relationship with the “poster” is low, the impact of comments and likes on the attitude is considered, whereby likes trigger positive, whereas comments – negative evaluations.

Towards an Emergent Semantic Web

In his in uential article about the evolution of the Web, Berners-Lee [1] envisions a Semantic Web in which humans and computers alike are capable of understanding and processing information. This vision is yet to materialize. The main obstacle for the Semantic Web vision is that in today's Web meaning is rooted most often not in formal semantics, but in natural language and, in the sense of semiology, emerges not before interpretation and processing. Yet, an automated form of interpretation and processing can be tackled by precisiating raw natural language. To do that, Web agents extract fuzzy grassroots ontologies through induction from existing Web content. Inductive fuzzy grassroots ontologies thus constitute organically evolved knowledge bases that resemble automated gradual thesauri, which allow precisiating natural language [2]. The Web agents' underlying dynamic, self-organizing, and best-effort induction, enable a sub-syntactical bottom up learning of semiotic associations. Thus, knowledge is induced from the users' natural use of language in mutual Web interactions, and stored in a gradual, thesauri-like lexical-world knowledge database as a top-level ontology, eventually allowing a form of computing with words [3]. Since when computing with words the objects of computation are words, phrases and propositions drawn from natural languages, it proves to be a practical notion to yield emergent semantics for the Semantic Web. In the end, an improved understanding by computers on the one hand should upgrade human- computer interaction on the Web, and, on the other hand allow an initial version of human- intelligence amplification through the Web.

Thematic thinking and individual performance in research and development

Individuals differ in their preference for processing information on the basis of taxonomic, feature-based similarity, or thematic, relation-based similarity. These differences, which have been investigated in a recently emerging research stream in cognitive psychology, affect innovative behavior and thus constitute an important antecedent of individual performance in research and development (R&D) that has been overlooked so far in the literature on innovation management. To fill this research gap, survey and test data from the employees of a multinational information technology services firm are used to examine the relationship between thematic thinking and R&D professionals' individual performance. A moderated mediation model is applied to investigate the proposed relationships of thematic thinking and individual-level performance indicators. Results show a positive relationship between thematic thinking and innovativeness, as well as individual job performance. While the results do not support the postulated moderation of the innovativeness–job performance relationship by employees' political skill, they show that the relationship between thematic thinking and job performance is fully mediated by R&D professionals' innovativeness. The present study is thus the first to reveal a positive relationship between thematic thinking and innovative performance.

Impaired performance on the rapid visual information processing task (RVIP) could be an endophenotype of schizophrenia

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether healthy first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients show reduced sensitivity performance, higher intra-individual variability (IIV) in reaction time (RT), and a steeper decline in sensitivity over time in a sustained attention task. Healthy first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients (n=23) and healthy control subjects (n=46) without a family history of schizophrenia performed a demanding version of the Rapid Visual Information Processing task (RVIP). RTs, hits, false alarms, and the sensitivity index A' were assessed. The relatives were significantly less sensitive, tended to have higher IIV in RT, but sustained the impaired level of sensitivity over time. Impaired performance on the RVIP is a possible endophenotype for schizophrenia. Higher IIV in RT, apparently caused by impaired context representations, might result in fluctuations in control and lead to more frequent attentional lapses.