Electrocortical evidence for long-term incidental spatial learning through modified navigation instructions

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. The use of Navigation Assistance Systems for spatial orienting has become increasingly popular. Such automated navigation support, however, comes with a reduced processing of the surrounding environment and often with a decline of spatial orienting ability. To prevent such deskilling and to support spatial learning, the present study investigated incidental spatial learning by comparing standard navigation instructions with two modified navigation instruction conditions. The first modified instruction condition highlighted landmarks and provided additional redundant information regarding the landmark (contrast condition), while the second highlighted landmarks and included information of personal interest to the participant (personal-reference condition). Participants’ spatial knowledge of the previously unknown virtual city was tested three weeks later. Behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) data demonstrated enhanced spatial memory performance for participants in the modified navigation instruction conditions without further differentiating between modified instructions. Recognition performance of landmarks was better and the late positive complex of the event-related potential (ERP) revealed amplitude differences reflecting an increased amount of recollected information for modified navigation instructions. The results indicate a significant long-term spatial learning effect when landmarks are highlighted during navigation instructions

The inevitability and irreversibility of organizational uncontrollability

In this paper, a classic and seminal contribution of Williamson (J Polit Econ 75:123–138, 1967), “Hierarchical control and optimum firm size”, is revisited so as to remove two of its restrictive assumptions. The introduction of the dynamics of the quality of vertical communication into Williamson’s static model and the development of a simulation to analyze these dynamics provide the opportunity to demonstrate the plausibility of a new conjecture: in each and every hierarchically structured organization, irreversible organizational uncontrollability is ultimately bound to arise, even in a completely stable environment. This is our main contribution. Moreover, we demonstrate that this conjecture is also valid for non-hierarchically structured organizations