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Objective: The current investigation examined individual differences in route-learning strategies and their relative demands on visuospatial versus verbal working memory (WM) resources in virtual environments. Background: Learning new routes is a resource-demanding activity that must often be carried out in conjunction with other concurrent tasks. Virtual environments (VEs) are increasingly being used for training and research, pointing to the importance of determining the strategies people use to learn routes in these environments. Methods: Participants classified as having good or poor sense of direction (SOD) attempted to learn novel routes while concurrently performing either a verbal (articulatory suppression) or a visuospatial (tapping) WM interference task. Results: Different navigational strategies were observed in each SOD group. Individuals with poor SOD relied more heavily on verbal rather than visuospatial WM resources, as evidenced by greater disruption to route-learning performance from the articulatory suppression task relative to the tapping task. Conversely, individuals with good SOD exhibited more route-learning disruption from the tapping task, suggesting a greater reliance on visuospatial WM resources. Conclusion: Individuals differ from one another in the strategies they use and the WM resources they tap—verbal or visuospatial—to learn routes in VEs. Self-report measures can be used as indices of such individual differences in navigational strategy use in VE tasks. Application: Assessing SOD and associated WM resources have implications for targeted training for navigation in VEs and for the design of in-vehicle navigation systems.

There is increasing interest in understanding how relationships promote children's understanding of their own and others' thoughts and feelings. A key question in this research is whether children's ability and motivation to represent and nderstand anothers' thoughts and feelings is a function of the quality of the relationship with that individual or, alternatively, a more general characteristic of the child that is similarly expressed across relationship contexts. The current study sought to extend previous research by assessing mentalising behaviour in early adolescence and examining intra‐individual differences in adolescents' mentalising behaviour about self and other in different relationships. The research design exploited the natural experiment of the secondary school, in which children develop very diverse relationships with different teachers. In the spring of the academic year, a vignette‐based, semi‐structured interview was administered, and students' understanding and attributions of mental states of their most and least liked teachers were coded using a newly developed system. Results indicated that there were significant intra‐individual differences in adolescents' mentalising; the psychological sophistication with which adolescents understood and described another's behaviour was predicted from the affective quality of the relationship. In addition, there was significantly less incongruity or distortion in adolescents' mentalising about their most liked teacher compared with their least liked teacher, highlighting the need to consider not only the presence but also the 'accuracy' of mentalising.

Skill acquisition follows a pattern of rapid improvement early on, followed by decreasing performance increments as the skill continues to be practiced, a pattern captured by the "power law of practice," (P = BNα). The purpose of these studies was to extend previous research by investigating the impact of individual differences on the course of adult communicative-skill acquisition. In Study 1, participants learned a sequence for describing geometric arrays and then executed 90 performance trials. Individual differences in working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and psychomotor ability were assessed. It was found that counter to expectations, speed of information processing was negatively correlated with overall learning rate and that psychomotor ability was related to asymptotic performance. In Study 2, employing a more complex communication task, speed of information processing was positively correlated with learning rate, working memory capacity predicted initial performance speed, and psychomotor ability was associated with asymptotic performance.

As cognitive models of behavior continue to evolve, the mechanics of cognitive exceptionality, with its range of individual variations in abilities and performance, remains a challenge to psychology. Reaching beyond the standard view of exceptional cognition equaling superior intelligence, the Handbook of Individual Differences in Cognition examines the latest findings from psychobiology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, for a comprehensive state-of-the-art volume. Breaking down cognition in terms of attentional mechanisms, working memory, and higher-order processing, contributors discu.

Research on social perception and a reassessment of findings from third-person research suggest that an individual's tendency to third-person perception is constrained by his or her perceptual position. For some people (e.g., the less well educated), it is probably less easily possible to perceive others as more susceptible to media effects than themselves. These kinds of constraints were investigated using data on third-person perception of television viewing behaviors (which is analogous to third-person perception of media influences). The authors found that people indeed showed a weaker tendency to third-person perception if they were in a less favorable position to do so, given their own viewing behavior and their attitudes. The limits / possibilities perspective seems useful for integrating research findings and may enhance our understanding of individual differences in third-person perception.

Objective: We examine the construct of collective orientation, develop a measure to assess individual differences in collective orientation, and examine the extent to which the collective orientation of team members predicts performance on a variety of team tasks. Background: Scholars increasingly emphasize the importance of teamwork in collaborative work environments, and evidence indicates that a lack of teamwork is a prominent factor in many real-world accidents. Although it is clear that some persons are more team oriented than others are, there are few instruments available to assess individual differences in collective orientation in a team context. Method: We develop a scale to measure collective orientation in teams, gather evidence on reliability and construct validity, and examine the extent to which collective orientation predicts team performance. Results: Results indicate that the Collective Orientation Scale is reliable, correlates with cognate measures, and predicts performance on a variety of team tasks. Conclusion: We discuss the role of collective orientation in teams and the application of this scale to assess and diagnose teamwork deficiencies in work groups. Application: This research should contribute to a further understanding of factors that influence collaboration and coordination in teams.

Children's emotion understanding is crucial for healthy social and academic development. The behaviors influenced by emotion understanding in childhood have received much attention, but less focus has been placed on factors that may predict individual differences in emotion understanding, the principal issue addressed in the current review. A more thorough understanding of the developmental underpinnings of this skill may allow for better prediction of emotion understanding, and for interventions to improve emotion understanding early in development. Here, we present theoretical arguments for the substantial roles of three aspects of children's environments in the development of emotion understanding: family expressiveness, discussions about emotions, and language development, and we discuss how these are interrelated. Ultimately, this may aid in predicting the effects of environmental influences on the development of emotion understanding more broadly and the mechanisms by which they do so.

Forty subjects performed four information processing tasks. Three aspects of the data were examined: individual differences in time-sharing efficiency; task-related differences in timesharing efficiency; and interaction of processing codes and response hands. Results showed little concrete evidence for a general time-sharing ability; supported a multiple resource concept of attention; and favored a condition of "task-hemispheric integrity" in which the hemisphere of task processing (spatial or verbal) is the same one controlling the task responding hand (left vs. right). The implications of these results to operator performance in complex systems are discussed.

This study examined the influence of several factors on employees' desire to provide upward feedback to their supervisors on an impending upward feedback system. Self-report data from 153 university employees indicated that the desire to provide upward feedback related negatively to fear of retaliation and positively to role appropriateness, perceived usefulness, rater self-efficacy, leader-member exchange, knowledge of upward feedback, top management support, coworker support, and feedback-seeking behavior. The authors also found that perceived usefulness mediated the relationships among fear of retaliation, leader-member exchange, top management support, coworker support, and knowledge of upward feedback with desire to provide upward feedback. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate attitudes toward interacting with foreign nationals from emerging and developed markets. Differences in attitudes are assessed using liability-of-foreignness factors.Design/methodology/approach– Purposive sample collected at a private university in Australia; hierarchical linear modeling approach examines differences across regions of Australia, Asia, Middle East, Europe, and North America; Type 2 moderated mediation procedures.Findings– Findings argue for variations across individual difference variables relative to the inclination to interact with emerging markets foreign nationals. Europeans' willingness to interact with emerging market foreign nationals is diminished with high levels of tendency to stereotype, whereas North Americans' willingness to interact with developed market foreign nationals is enhanced with high levels of tendency to stereotype.Research limitations/implications– Use of self-reported measures may limit validity and generalizability; cross-sectional data; common method variance.Practical implications– A greater consideration of cultural diversity inherent in the workforce allows for diminished adjustment difficulties. Acknowledgment and contextualization of diversity is not an option but a necessity upon which organizations must act to reach their fullest potential in respective foreign locations.Social implications– Supports greater respect for social and cultural beliefs, norms, and values. Respect has implications for relationships and performance.Originality/value– Content presents diversity issues within global organizations on their quest to employ global talent.

This study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between simulator fidelity and training effectiveness. Two aspects of simulator fidelity were manipulated, namely, the degree to which a training simulator "looked like" actual equipment (physical fidelity), and the extent to which it "acted like" real equipment (functional fidelity). A transfer of training design was used to assess learning. Performance on an electromechanical troubleshooting task was correlated with a number of individual difference variables. Results indicated that physical and functional fidelity were interdependent and that temporal measures were most sensitive to fidelity manipulations. Low functional fidelity was associated with longer problem solution and inter-response times. Persons with high analytic abilities took longer to solve problems, but required fewer troubleshooting tests and made fewer incorrect solutions.

AbstractThe relations between prosocial risk taking (taking a risk to benefit another person; PSRT) and interpersonal regret (regret that one's choices have caused a poor outcome for another person) were examined in 192 children aged 7–9. PSRT was measured by children's choices within a gambling task in which one choice guaranteed participants a good prize whereas the other involved risking this prize to help a peer also win a good prize. Interpersonal regret was assessed within the same task by examining children's change in emotion when they learned they would have won a better prize for a peer had they chosen differently. Performance on this task was also examined in relation to sympathy and resource sharing. Findings indicated that the operationalizations of PSRT and interpersonal regret were meaningful. Children who took a prosocial risk were more generous in a resource sharing task. In some circumstances, children who took a prosocial risk were also more likely to experience interpersonal regret than those who did not take a prosocial risk, indicating that experiencing interpersonal regret may be related to individual differences in prosociality. However, experiencing interpersonal regret did not have a direct effect on subsequent prosocial behavior, when measured by resource sharing. We consider findings in relation to a possible distinction between outcome and process regret and the generalizability of the behavioral consequences of regret.

Individual differences among users of a hierarchical file system were investigated. Results indicate that psychometric tests of vocabulary and spatial visualization are the best predictors of task performance, accounting for 45% of the variance in the data. The spatial predictor was found to be the most influential. This was dramatically illustrated by the fact that, on the average, subjects with low spatial ability took twice as long to perform the task as those with high spatial ability. Surprisingly, experience alone does not predict task performance. A comparison of the frequency of command usage between subjects with high and low spatial ability revealed that those with low spatial ability were getting lost in the hierarchical file structure. These data have implications for redesigning the software interface so as to accommodate people with low spatial ability.

AbstractThe goal of the current study was to investigate the contribution of both trait‐like individual differences and dyadic processes to the content of children's conversations. Fifty‐two groups typically consisting of four same‐sex unfamiliar nine‐year‐old children (N = 202) interacted in all possible dyads, resulting in six dyads per group. Each dyad completed a 5‐min frustration task and a 5‐min planning task. Observers coded children's verbalizations into 10 categories and further summed these categories into prosocial (suggest, agree, solicit input, ask, encourage, state personal) and antisocial (command, disagree, discourage, aggress) verbalizations, resulting in 24 variables (12 per task). Across both tasks, Social Relations Model analyses provided evidence of the role of both individual differences [significant effects for actor variance (15 of 24 variables), actor‐actor correlations, and intrapersonal correlations] and dyadic processes [significant effects for partner variance (4 of 24 variables), relationship variance (18 of 24 variables), dyadic reciprocity correlations (10 of 24 variables), and interpersonal correlations] in children's conversations with peers.