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The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have converged. Family change has not been uniform, however, and the widening gaps in marital status, relationship stability, and childbearing between socioeconomic groups raise concerns about child well-being in poor families and future inequality. This paper uses data from a recent cohort of young adults – Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – to investigate whether disparities in cognitive ability and non-cognitive skills contribute to this gap. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of differences in key family outcomes across education groups show that, though individual non-cognitive traits are significantly associated with union status, relationship instability, and single motherhood, they collectively make no significant contribution to the explanation of educational gaps for almost all of these outcomes. Measured skills can explain as much as 25 percent of differences in these outcomes by family background (measured by mother’s education), but this effect disappears when own education is added to the model. Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly predictive of educational attainment but, conditional on education, explain very little of the socioeconomic gaps in family outcomes for young adults.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to verify the predicted relationship between the demographic (i.e. tenure, functional background, etc.) difference and cognitive difference among top managers and examine how such a relationship is affected by the communication among top managers.

The authors hypothesized that there is a positive relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal manager on a TMT, and that such a relationship is mediated by the degree of communication that the focal manager has with other team members on the TMT. Using Structural Equation Modeling techniques, these hypotheses were tested based on a sample of 348 top managers that consist of 28 top management teams.

It was found that the hypothesized relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal top manager was supported with respect to the tenure of a manager, but not the functional background of a manager. Moreover, it was found that communication frequency of a focal manager with other team members mediated the relationship between the tenure deviation and the cognitive deviation of the focal manager and that tenure deviation negatively influenced communication frequency, which in turn, negatively influenced the cognitive deviation of the manager.

These findings imply that: when constructing a competitive top management, practitioners such as boards of directors of a firm should pay more attention to the tenure diversity of a top management team because tenure diversity influences the cognitive diversity of the team; and communication among members of a management team can reduce the cognitive differences among members. However, communication happens more frequently among managers with similar tenure than among managers with dissimilar tenure. To promote consensus, managers need to watch for the forming of group fault lines along tenure within their teams.

As far as is known, this is the first study that uses relational demography to examine the influence of tenure difference on cognitive difference among members of a top management team and to expose a mediating role played by communication frequency.

In the managerial and organizational cognition (MOC) literature, cognition is often studied by considering the observable characteristics of decision-makers. However, these studies have largely neglected cognitive differences stemming from the cultural, national, ethnical, and geographical (CNEG) characteristics of decision-makers – ones that are commonly studied in the field of international business (IB) research. Despite the contributions of IB research within the domain, the advancements have not found their way to the broader literature on MOC. In order to remedy this deficiency, this chapter seeks to introduce the work conducted within the IB field on the cognitive differences and the resultant cognitive distance stemming from decision-makers’ CNEG characteristics. This work has generated original insights on: (1) cognitive distances; (2) cognitive structures; (3) the legacy of the home country; and (4) tolerance to cognitive differences. As a result, this chapter strengthens the foundations for cumulative knowledge building by providing an integrative understanding of cognitive research based on the characteristics of managers.

Attentive to task-related information is the prerequisite for task completion. Comparing the cognition between attentive readers (AR) and inattentive readers (IAR) is of great value for improving reading services which has seldom been studied. To explore their cognitive differences, this study investigates the effectiveness, efficiency and cognitive resource allocation strategy by eye-tracking technology.

A controlled user study of two types of task, fact-finding (FF) and content understanding (CU) tasks was conducted to collect data including answer for task, fixation duration (FD), fixation count (FC), fixation duration proportion (FDP), and fixation count proportion (FCP). 24 participants were placed into AR or IAR group according to their fixation duration on paragraphs related to task.

Two types of cognitive resource allocation strategies, question-oriented (QO) and navigation-assistant (NA) were identified according to the differences in FDP and FCP. In FF task, although QO strategy was applied by the two groups, AR group was significantly more effective and efficient. In CU task, although the two groups were similar in effectiveness and efficiency, AR group promoted their strategies to NA while IAR group sticked to applying QO strategy. Furthermore, an interesting phenomenon “win by uncertainty”, which implies IAR group may get correct answer through uncertain means, such as clue, domain knowledge or guess, rather than task-related information, was observed.

This study takes a deep insight into cognition from the prospect of attentive and inattentive to task-related information. Identifying indicators about cognition helps to distinguish attentive and inattentive readers in various tasks automatically. The cognitive resource allocation strategy applied by readers sheds new light on reading skill training. A typical reading phenomenon “win by uncertainty” was found and defined. Understanding the phenomenon is of great value for satisfying reader information need and enhancing their deep learning.

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to estimate the changing returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills with respect to college completion, and quantifies the extent to which gender differences in these skills are driving the college gender gap. The use of two distinct college graduation cohorts allows a dynamic analysis of the widening female advantage in college graduation. I decompose the increase in the college gender gap into three pertinent categories of measurable attributes: family background, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills (captured by school suspensions, behavioral problems, and legal infractions). A second decomposition is applied to the change in the gap between the two periods. The results show that roughly half of the observed college graduation gender gap in the NLSY97 is due to female advantages in observable characteristics, and roughly half is “unexplained”: due to gender differences in the coefficients. With respect to the change in the gap, approximately 29% of the difference in differences is the “explained” component, attributed to changes in the relative characteristics of men and women. In particular, declining non-cognitive skills in men are associated with about 14% of the increase in the gender gap.

Intercultural interactions, in domains such as civil aviation and international peacekeeping, expand awareness of national differences in cognition. At the same time, experience with national differences in natural settings provides a more complex picture of cognition. The Cultural Lens Model captures the nature and origin of the cognitive differences. This paper reviews cognitive dimensions that vary over national groups. It uses the Cultural Lens Model to describe the implications of these cognitive differences for five intercultural challenges: problem definition, planning, coordination, prediction, and training. Finally, the paper suggests mechanisms for increasing international effectiveness in the face of cognitive differences.

Past research suggests that heavy media multitaskers (HMMs) perform worse on tasks that require executive control, compared to light media multitaskers (LMMs). This paper aims to investigate whether individual differences between HMMs and LMMs make them respond differently to advertising in a media multitasking context and whether this stems from differences in the ability versus the motivation to regulate one’s attention. This is investigated by manipulating participants’ autonomy over attention allocation.

For the first study (n = 85), a between subjects design with three conditions was used: sequential, multitasking under low autonomy over attention allocation and multitasking under high autonomy over attention allocation. This study investigated the inhibitory control of HMMs vs LMMs in a very controlled multitasking setting. The second study (n = 91) replicated the design of study one in a more naturalistic media multitasking setting and investigated the driving role of motivation vs ability for cognitive load differences between HMMs and LMMs and the consequent impact on advertising effectiveness.

Study I suggests that HMMs perform worse on a response inhibition task than LMMs after multitasking freely (in which case motivation to regulate attention determines the process), but not after their attention was guided externally by the experimenter (in which case their motivation could no longer determine the process). Study II argues that when motivation to switch attention is at play, cognitive load differences occur between HMMs and LMMs. This study additionally reveals that under these circumstances, HMMs are more persuaded by advertisements (report higher purchase intentions) compared to LMMs, while no differences appear when only ability is at play.

Executive control exists of different components (Miyake et al., 2000). The current study only focused on the impact of media multitasking frequency on response inhibition, but it would be interesting for future research to investigate whether media multitasking frequency equally affects the other sub-dimensions. Additionally, the impairment of response inhibition has been shown to predict a large number of other behavioral and impulse-control outcomes such as unhealthy food choices and alcohol and drug use (e.g. Friese et al., 2008). Future research should consider investigating other consequences of heavy media multitasking behavior, both advertising related and unrelated.

From a practical point of view, understanding the mechanisms that are driving the effects of media multitasking on advertising effectiveness for different groups of media-consumers could make it easier for practitioners to efficiently plan their media campaigns. Based on the findings of this study, the authors can derive that HMMs will be more depleted in cognitive resources and inhibitory control when media multitasking compared to LMMs. Consequently, this makes them more prone to advertising messages. This knowledge is of great importance for advertisers who could, based here on, aim to target HMMs more often than LMMs.

Two experimental studies by the authors confirm and add value to previous academic findings about the negative relation between media multitasking frequency and tasks that demand executive control. This study contributed to the previous by investigating whether individual differences between heavy and light media multitaskers make them respond differently toward advertising and whether the driving mechanism of these differences is a lack of motivation or ability to efficiently shift attention.

At the level of a cognitive schema, a business model is a mental map of a firm’s value-creating, value-delivering, and value-capturing activities and the linkages between them. An important question in the study of business models as cognitive schemas is whether and how schemas differ across industry actors and whether the differences are connected to the variation observed in actual business models in the industry. This chapter examines, in particular, the ways in which business model schemas of industry insiders differ from those of industry outsiders. Using data from interviews with chief executive officers (CEOs) of 30 legal-tech firms, we graphically construct and analyze the CEOs’ schemas of important causal interdependencies between their firms’ activities. The analysis shows systematic differences between insiders and outsider CEOs’ schemas. We theorize that these differences underlie insider and outsider CEOs’ distinct approaches to opportunity recognition, expertise perception, and value framing, and have consequences for actual business model evolution in the industry.

Advancing knowledge about effectively managing the ageing workforce and ensuring economic sustainability for a growing retired cohort is a recognised priority for organisational health researchers, employers and governments. The purpose of this paper is to test social perceptions that older workers' cognitive performance and job attitudes compare adversely to their younger colleagues.

The research assessed samples of older and younger workers in objective tests of cognitive abilities and subjective job attitudes. An opportunity sampling method was employed to recruit a heterogeneous group of participants in Australia (n=172).

No significant differences in cognitive ability between the groups were identified; older workers were as cognitively skilled for their job as their younger colleagues. No significant group difference for perceptions of social support, job commitment, job satisfaction or turnover intentions was identified.

The cross‐sectional research design adopted by this research prevented a more detailed examination of the data in terms of causal relationships. While the cognitive testing provided objective rather than subjective data and, therefore, is not as susceptible to response biases such as common method variance, the small sample who undertook the cognitive testing is acknowledged as a research limitation.

This research has implications for the reduction in unemployment of older workers and directly addresses the social issues of an ageing labour force.

The paper demonstrates that stereotypical assumptions concerning inadequate performance and low job commitment commonly attributed to older workers are not in fact indicative of all ageing employees.