Learner-controlled e-learning has become a preferred medium for the delivery of organizational training. While e-learning offers organizations and trainees many advantages, it also comes with several potential disadvantages. The aim of this study was to explore the relative efficacy of learner- and program-controlled e-learning for content that differs in its complexity. This study also explored cognitive load as a differential mediator of the interaction between learner control and training content complexity for predicting cognitive and behavioral learning outcomes. Finally, learning goal orientation was explored as a motivational individual difference that helps learners cope with complex, learner-controlled e-learning environments. Results suggest that while there is little difference between learners in learner- and program-controlled e-learning environments for content that is relatively simple in nature, complex, learner-controlled e-learning environments are detrimental to cognitive learning relative to complex, program-controlled environments. Moreover, the results suggest that this interaction is differentially mediated by cognitive load, suggesting that complex, learner-controlled environments induce high cognitive demands onto learners which ultimately inhibit cognitive learning. Finally, learning goal orientation was identified as more facilitative individual difference in learner-controlled e-learning environments relative to program-controlled and simple training environments. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are also discussed.

Considerable evidence indicates that the expectations individuals hold about the effects of alcohol determine, to a degree, the amount of alcohol they drink. However, the bulk of this evidence was acquired using verbally-based measures of expectancy. The present study sought to extend the validation network by utilizing an electrophysiological measure -- the P300 component of the Event Related Potentials (ERPs) -- which is thought to index fundamental neurophysiological processes sensitive to expectancy.Previous research has demonstrated that, when presented with various outcomes of alcohol consumption, heavier drinkers endorse statements that assert positive and arousing effects of alcohol, while lighter drinkers endorse sedating and negative effects of alcohol. Given the sensitivity of the P300 to violation of subjective expectancies, it was hypothesized that P300 amplitude elicited by stimuli violating one's alcohol expectancies (e.g., statements describing sedating effects of alcohol for individuals with high positive expectancies) would be correlated with the participants' alcohol expectancies measured by traditional self-report measures.Participants were presented with statements reflecting a wide range of alcohol outcome effects, which either violated or confirmed the participant's own set of alcohol expectancies, while the ERPs evoked by these stimuli were recorded. As predicted, the P 300 amplitude elicited by negative alcohol expectancy stimuli was positively correlated with the degree of endorsement of positive/arousing expectancies on the self-report measure. That is, the higher the individual's positive/arousing expectancies, the larger the P300 elicited by stimuli asserting the negative effects of alcohol. There was no significant correlation, however, between P300 amplitude elicited by positive alcohol expectancy stimuli and the degree of endorsement of negative/sedating expectancies on the self-report measure.In sum, variations in the amplitude of the P300 were consistent with the model of Alcohol Expectancies: Namely, words imputing negative/sedating effects of alcohol elicited a large P300 in individuals with high but not low positive alcohol expectancies. By indexing the brain's electrophysiological response sensitive to expectancy violations, these findings demonstrate concordance between verbal measures of alcohol expectancies, which by their very nat ure are introspective, and a psychophysiological index of expectancy thought to operate automatically and to be independent of overt responding.

Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships that frame categories contain reliable adjacent relationships making the type of context (adjacent or nonadjacent) used for category acquisition unclear. In addition, previous research suggests that infants show learning of adjacent dependencies earlier than learning of nonadjacent dependencies and that the learning of nonadjacent word relationships is affected by the intervening information (how informative it is and how familiar it is). Together these issues raise the question of whether the type of context used for category acquisition changes as a function of development. To address this question, infants ages 13, 15, and 18 months were exposed to an artificial language containing adjacent and nonadjacent information that predicted a category. Infants were then tested to determine whether they 1) detected the category using adjacent information 2) only detected the nonadjacent dependency, with no categorization, or 3) detected both the nonadjacent relationship and the category. The results showed high individual variability in the youngest age group with a gradual convergence towards detecting the category and the associated environments by 18 months. These findings suggest that both adjacent and nonadjacent information may be used at early stages in category acquisition. The results reveal a dynamic picture of how infants use distributional information for category acquisition and support a developmental shift consistent with previous infant studies examining dependencies between words.

Dėmesio mirksėjimo efektas – tai plačiai žinomas reiškinys dėmesio tyrimuose. Jis atspindi dėmesingo informacijos apdorojimo ribas, kadangi greitai (10 stimulų per sekundę dažniu) toje pačioje regos lauko vietoje pateikus stimulų seką dažniausiai žmonės nepastebi ir/ arba neatsimena antrojo reikšminio stimulo. Tai įvyksta tuo atveju, kai šis pasirodo 200-500 ms intervale nuo pirmojo reikšminio stimulo pateikimo. Neseniai Martens ir kolegos (2006) nustatė, jog kai kuriems žmonėms dėmesio mirksėjimo efektas nepasireiškia, jie buvo pavadinti „nemirksinčiais“. Manoma, kad individualius skirtumus lemia nevienodai efektyvus gebėjimas iš nereikšmingos informacijos srauto išsirinkti reikšmingą. Šiame darbe siekta patikrinti, ar individuali darbinės atminties talpa, tiriamojo emocinė būsena ir tiriamojo asmenybės bruožai turi įtakos dėmesio efekto išreikštumui. Naudojant parametrizuotą dėmesio mirksėjimo efekto analizės būdą, nustatyta, kad didesnė darbinės atminties talpa sąlygoja mažesnį dėmesio mirksėjimo efektą. Šie rezultatai patvirtina nuomonę, kad dėmesio mirksėjimo efektas yra darbinės atminties talpos ribotumo pasekmė. Taip pat nustatyta, kad tiriamojo emocinio sužadinamumo būsena yra susijusi su dėmesio mirksėjimo efekto stiprumu, o asmenybės bruožai – su trukme. / The attentional blink is a well-known phenomenon in the study of attention. It reflects the impaired ability to identify the second of two targets presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of events if it appears between 200 and 500 ms after the first target. Recently Martens et al. (2006) reported that about 5% of the population (referred to as “non-blinkers”) shows little or no attentional blink under conditions in which most people (“blinkers”) do show. It is proposed that aforementioned differences are determined by individual differences in efficiency of ignoring irrelevant information. Thus, the aims of this master’s thesis were to investigate the impact of working memory capacity, emotional state and personality traits on attentional blink effect. Using parameterized attentional blink analysis method, based on curve fitting, the negative correlation between the size of attentional blink and working memory capacity was revealed. These findings support the idea that individual processing limitations and working memory play a key role in attentional blink. Also it was demonstrated that emotional arousal has impact on the strength of attentional blink and personality traits have effect on the span of attentional blink.

Relational aggression encompasses behaviour meant to hurt others by destroying their friendships and reputation (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995). As peer relationships take on greater importance in early adolescence, relational aggression becomes more accepted and prevalent, yet perceived as equally or more harmful to its targets than physical aggression. The present study explored whether reactive and proactive subtypes of relational aggression were associated with an inability to empathize with others, regulate emotional states, and hold attitudes that it is acceptable to manipulate and harm others. Empathy, emotion regulation, and Machiavellianism’s roles in predicting reactive and proactive relational aggression was examined using Crick and Dodge’s (1994) reformulated Social Information-Processing Theory’s framework. Reactive relational aggression was expected to be associated with low empathy and high emotion dysreglation. Proactive relational aggression was expected to be predicted by high empathy, low emotion dysregulation, and high Machiavellianism. Low empathy was expected to predict overt aggression indices. One hundred and thirty-three children (73 females, 60 males, Mage = 12.84 years) in grades 6 through 8 from five schools in a public Ontario schoolboard were recruited. Caregivers completed a measure of their child’s emotions and behaviours (The Emotion Regulation Checklist; Shields & Cicchetti, 1995). Participating students completed four self-report measures assessing relational and overt aggression (Children’s Social Behaviour Scale – Self-Report; Crick & Grotpeter, 1995), proactive and reactive subtypes of aggression (Little, Jones, Henrich, & Hawley, 2003), empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index; Davis, 1980), and Machiavellianism (Kiddie Mach Scale; Christie & Geis, 1970) during one 60 minute session. Empathy, Machiavellianism, and emotion dysregulation scores were associated with total, reactive, and proactive relational aggression scores. When contrasting subtypes of aggression were controlled, however, these emotional and cognitive variables did not predict total and reactive relational aggression. There was a non-significant trend for higher levels of empathy to predict proactive relational aggression. Low empathy significantly predicted total and reactive overt aggression indices. Machiavellianism predicted reactive and proactive overt aggression. Emotion regulation was not a significant predictor in analyses. Results provide support for the role of Machiavellianism and empathy in relational aggression, particularly proactive or goal-oriented instances.

Recognition is the cognitive process by which we judge whether a given object, person, place, or event has occurred in our previous experience or is new to us. According to signal detection theory, old/new recognition decisions are based on how much evidence one finds in memory that an item has appeared previously (e.g., its familiarity) but can be affected substantially by response bias, a general proclivity to respond “old” or “new.” When experimental conditions evoke a “conservative” response bias, participants will require a relatively high amount of memory evidence before calling an item “old” and will give a high proportion of “new” responses to both old and new items; when conditions promote a “liberal” bias, participants will relax their required level of memory evidence and will call a high proportion of both old and new items “old.” Response bias is usually analyzed at a group level, but substantial individual differences in bias can underlie group means. These differences suggest that, independent of any experimental manipulation, some people require more memory evidence than others before they are willing to call an item “old.” The central motivation for the present work is the possibility that these individual differences are meaningful and reflect bias levels that inhere within individuals. Seven experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that response bias can be characterized as an intra-individually stable cognitive “trait” with an influence extending beyond recognition memory. The present experiments are based on the expectation that if response bias is a cognitive trait, it should a) be consistent within an individual across time, to-be-recognized materials, and situations; b) generalize beyond recognition memory to other tasks involving binary decisions based on accumulated evidence; c) be associated with personality traits that represent one’s willingness to take action based on limited information; and d) carry consequences for recognition in applied settings. The results indicated substantial within-individual bias consistency in two recognition tests separated by 10 minutes (Experiment 1) and a similar level of consistency when the two tests were separated by one week (Experiment 2). Bias was strongly correlated across the stimulus domains of words and paintings (Experiment 3) and words and faces (Experiment 7). Correlations remained significant across two ostensibly independent experiments differing markedly in context and materials and separated by an average of 2.5 weeks (Experiments 6 and 7). Recognition bias predicted frequency of false recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Experiment 4) and false alarms in an eyewitness identification task (Experiment 7). No relationship was detected between bias and grain size in estimation from general knowledge (Experiment 2), risk avoidance through the use of report option on a trivia task (Experiments 4 and 5), or speed and accuracy on a go-no go task (Experiment 6). Personality measures suggested relationships between response bias and need for cognition, maximizing versus satisficing tendencies, and regret proneness. Collectively, these findings support the idea that response bias as measured in recognition memory tasks is a partial function of stable individual differences that have broad significance for cognition. / Graduate

The past two decades have seen a substantial increase in the availability of numerical data that individuals are faced with on a daily basis. In addition, research uncovering the multiple facets of statistical reasoning has become increasingly prominent. Both gender differences and the effect of experience or training have emerged as two key factors that influence performance in statistics. Surprisingly, though, the combined effects of these two variables have not been studied. This gap in understanding the joint effect of gender and experience on statistical reasoning is addressed in the present dissertation with six studies. In Study 1 (N = 201), participants with various levels of experience in statistics were asked to complete the Statistical Reasoning Assessment (SRA; Garfield, 2003). Although the performance of both genders improved with experience, the gender gap persisted across all experience levels. Multiple measures of individual differences were used in a confirmatory structural equation model. This model supported the idea that differences in statistical reasoning are not uniquely a matter of cognitive ability. In fact, gender was found to influence statistical reasoning directly, as well as indirectly through its influence on thinking dispositions. In Studies 2 (N = 67), 3 (N = 157), and 4 (N = 206), the role of stereotype threat was examined as a potential cause of the persisting gender gap in statistics, and value affirmation was tested as an intervention to overcome stereotype threat. Despite the fact that many women believed negative stereotypes about the ability of women in statistics, value affirmation had no significant impact on performance. To help explain this lack of effect, and in keeping with the results of the structural equation model suggesting a multi-pronged approach, efforts were turned towards a different (and potentially richer) cognitive factor. Specifically, mental representations were explored to help shed light on the root causes of those conceptual understanding differences in statistics. In Studies 5 and 6, gender differences in mental representations of statistical features were examined using a categorization paradigm. In Study 5 (N = 219), extending some of the key findings in Studies 1, 3 and 4, it was established that two courses in statistics are necessary to create a significant difference in the quality of mental representations of statistical concepts. More importantly, Study 6 (N = 208) demonstrated how constraining the task format particularly benefits women in that the quality of their reasoning significantly improved, where that of men was equal across tasks. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

The construct of cognitive control is often invoked to provide a mechanism responsible for information-processing in ill-defined situations. However, the dual-mechanism theory of cognitive control distinguishes between proactive and reactive varieties, and provides a more concrete framework for explaining behavior across various conditions. Importantly, although proactive and reactive control have been theorized to apply to differential performance observed in various clinical and aging populations, no empirical work has been conducted examining how this theory may apply to individual differences in working memory capacity within a young, healthy population. The current research directly assessed proactive versus reactive control by administering three versions of the AX version of the continuous performance test to individuals varying in working memory capacity. Across the task versions, specific trial type frequencies were manipulated to examine whether this variable interacted with WMC to cause individuals to engage in one control type over the other. In addition, the current work investigated whether individuals can change their mode of control on a trial-to-trial basis, something that had not previously been examined. Individuals low in working memory capacity exhibited specific performance deficits relative to the individuals high in working memory capacity. The results extend the application of the dual-mechanism theory to individual differences in working memory capacity and provide a theoretical framework to explain previous findings in the working memory capacity literature.

How does the behavior of the entrepreneur affect the development and performance of the business venture? Why do some small business owner-managers remain small, when others wish to grow? In this dissertation the author tries to answer these questions by examining the importance of stable psychological characteristics of the entrepreneur on business performance and expected future performance. The author argues that the entrepreneurship research focus on the entrepreneurial personality is far too narrow, ignoring a crucial range of psychological factors such as intellectual ability and motivation that matter immensely in terms of how entrepreneurs act. Drawing on modern psychological and entrepreneurship research, the author shows how emotions, attitudes, values, IQ, and attribution affect the entrepreneurs’ behavior and subsequently the performance of the business. The author’s own research is presented and commented upon in six different research papers and in a comprehensive introduction chapter. / Inget spikblad

Current theorising in the area of cognitive arithmetic suggests that simple arithmetic knowledge is stored in memory and accessed in the same way as word knowledge i.e., it is stored in a network of associations, with simple facts retrieved automatically from memory. However, to date, the main methodologies that have been employed to investigate automaticity in simple arithmetic processing (e.g., production and verification) have produced a wide variety of difficulties in interpretation. In an attempt to address this, the present series of investigations utilised a numerical variant of the well established single word semantic priming paradigm that involved the presentation of problems as primes (e.g., 2 + 3) and solutions as targets (e.g., 5), as they would occur in a natural setting. Adult university students were exposed to both addition and multiplication problems in each of three main prime target relationship conditions, including congruent (e.g., 2 + 3 and 5), incongruent (e.g., 2 + 3 and 13), and neutral conditions (X + Y and 5). When combined with a naming task and the use of short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), this procedure enabled a more valid and reliable investigation into automaticity and the cognitive mechanisms underlying simple arithmetic processing. The first investigation in the present series addressed the question of automaticity in arithmetic fact retrieval, whilst the remaining investigations examined the main factors thought to influence simple arithmetic processing i.e., skill level, surface form, problem type and split. All factors, except for problem type, were found to influence processing in the arithmetic priming paradigm. For example, the results of all five investigations were consistent in revealing significant facilitation in naming congruent targets for skilled participants, following exposure to Arabic digit primes at the short SOA. Accordingly, the facilitation was explained in terms of the operation of an automatic spreading activation mechanism. Additionally, significant inhibitory effects in incongruent target naming were identified in skilled performance in all of the studies in the present series of investigations. Throughout the course of these investigations, these effects were found to vary with operation, surface form and SOA, and in the final investigation, the level of inhibition was found to vary with the split between the correct solution and the incongruent target. Consequently, a number of explanations were put forward to account for these effects. In the first two investigations, it was suggested that the inhibitory effects resulted from the use of a response validity checking mechanism, whilst in the final investigation, the results were more consistent with the activation of magnitude representations in memory (this can be likened to Dehaene’s, 1997, ‘number sense’). In contrast, the results of the third investigation led to the proposal that for number word primes, inhibition in processing results from the activation of phonological representations in memory, via a reading based mechanism. The present series of investigations demonstrated the utility of the numerical variant of the single word semantic priming paradigm for the investigation of simple arithmetic processing. Given its capacity to uncover the fundamental cognitive mechanisms at work in simple arithmetic operations, this methodology has many applications in future research.