Social Contexts, Agency, and Conflicts: Exploring Critical Aspects of Design for Future Smart Home Technologies

Smart devices are increasingly being designed for, and adopted in, the home environment. Prior scholarship has investigated the challenges that users face as they take up these devices in their homes. However, little is known about when and how users or potential users would prefer future domestic Internet of Things (IoT) to support their activities in home settings. To fill this gap, we conducted two co-design workshops, an in-home activity between the two sessions, and pre- and post-study interviews with 18 adult participants, who had diverse levels of prior experience of IoT use. Our findings contribute new insights into how smart home devices could adapt their behavior based on social contexts; how to re-imagine agency and support useful intelligibility; and how to resolve user-driven conflict by providing appropriate information about those with whom devices are shared. Finally, based on these findings, we discuss the implications of our work and provide a set of design considerations from which designers of future smart home technologies can benefit.

Reward learning and statistical learning independently influence attentional priority of salient distractors in visual search

Existing research demonstrates different ways in which attentional prioritization of salient nontarget stimuli is shaped by prior experience: Reward learning renders signals of high-value outcomes more likely to capture attention than signals of low-value outcomes, whereas statistical learning can produce attentional suppression of the location in which salient distractor items are likely to appear. The current study combined manipulations of the value and location associated with salient distractors in visual search to investigate whether these different effects of selection history operate independently or interact to determine overall attentional prioritization of salient distractors. In Experiment 1, high-value and low-value distractors most frequently appeared in the same location; in Experiment 2, high-value and low-value distractors typically appeared in distinct locations. In both experiments, effects of distractor value and location were additive, suggesting that attention-promoting effects of value and attention-suppressing effects of statistical location-learning independently modulate overall attentional priority. Our findings are consistent with a view that sees attention as mediated by a common priority map that receives and integrates separate signals relating to physical salience and value, with signal suppression based on statistical learning determined by physical salience, but not incentive salience.

Reaction or anticipation? Resilience in small- and medium-sized enterprises

PurposeBuilding on the recent capability-based conceptualisation of resilience, this paper aims to explore whether the experience of a previous crisis and entrepreneur resilience are associated with Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs') adoption of different anticipation strategies for adversities.Design/methodology/approachUsing original survey data on 959 Italian and German SMEs, the research uses a multinomial logistic regression model in order to test the influence of the prior experience of a crisis and the entrepreneur resilience on the likelihood of adopting different anticipation strategies.FindingsThe paper shows that the previous experience of a crisis increases the likelihood of regularly adopting proactive but non-formalised anticipation actions while decreasing the likelihood of adopting a pure reactive strategy to adversities; in addition, entrepreneur resilience is nonlinearly associated with anticipation strategies.Originality/valueThe main originalities rely on eschewing a pure binary view in relation to the organisational choice of adopting a reactive or a proactive approach towards adversities and on considering the entrepreneur resilience as a factor with both “bright” and “dark” side effects in relation to the anticipation of adversities.

Virtual conference participant’s perceptions of its effectiveness and future projections

Background The virtual conference format has become an essential tool for professional development of researchers around the world since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to identify empirical evidence of the benefits and challenges of virtual conferences by investigating participants’ experiences with them. Methods The study participants were delegates to the 40th annual meeting of the Korean Society of Nephrology, which was held virtually in September, 2020. A questionnaire was developed and implemented among the conference attendees. The 44-item questionnaire included five sub-scales related to participant perceptions of the virtual conference, which were (a) convenience and accessibility, (b) planning and organization, (c) technology use, (d) social exchanges, and (e) overall satisfaction, their preferences of conference formats, and their views of future projections for a virtual conference. Results A total of 279 delegates completed and returned the questionnaires (18.8% response rate). Participants varied in gender, age, profession, work location, and prior experience with conferences. On a four-point Likert scale (1 = “strongly disagree” and 4 = “strongly agree”), participants showed positive perceptions of the virtual conference in general, where the total mean (M) was 3.03 and less positive perceptions on social exchanges (M = 2.72). Participant perceptions of the virtual conference differed across age groups, professions, and prior experience with conferences (p < .05). Approximately half of the participants (n = 139) preferred the virtual format, and 33% (n = 92) preferred the conventional format. Participant preferences for the virtual format were somewhat evenly distributed between asynchronous (32.9%) and synchronous (29.1%) modes. Participants predicted a virtual conference would continue to be a popular delivery format after the end of the COVID-19. Conclusions Although participants had positive perceptions of the virtual conference, more support needs to be offered to those who may be less comfortable with using technology or with online interactions, and there is a need for improvement in supporting social exchange among attendees. Also, it is suggested that a blend of asynchronous and synchronous delivery methods should be considered to meet the varied needs of attendees.

Responsibility experience for your own life through volunteering

Phenomenon of the Volunteering reveals itself through dedicated time for volunteering, duration of volunteering commitment, area where volunteering is implemented and through age group of the volunteers. The object of the study is volunteering experience of young adults. Interpretative Phenomenological Analyses is research methodology. According to the phenomenological approach, research itself is not focusing on any foreseen objectives, oriented to the volunteers’ experience. In this article is presented part of the research, giving deeper view on one of the super-ordinates theme, with the aim: to present responsibility for your own life experience of young adults in long term and fulltime volunteering, while volunteered is held in social help area. In the study participated 6 research participants, 3 young men and 3 young women, 20–30 years old. To collect the data of the research were used semi-structured interviews. Conclusions of the study presented in this article shows 1) that through volunteering experience research participants perceived power and duty of own life’s quality. They got awareness about their own life – they can and they must be responsible of own life. 2) This power of responsibility is hidden in themselves and change of own life depends on the decisions made by them while volunteering. Prior experience of responsibility is opening decision possibilities and freedom possibilities in any change of life.

Influence of Control Precision and Prior Collaboration Experience on Trust and Cooperation in Inter-organizational Relationships

We investigate whether prior collaboration experience affects a focal partner’s response to the precision of monitoring controls adopted by a new partner, with consequences for their goodwill trust in, and subsequent cooperation with, the new partner. We expect the partner to interpret their new partner’s adoption of precise monitoring controls as either an effort to limit their autonomy or to reduce information asymmetry. The partner’s experience with past partners is posited to determine which interpretation is salient, with negative (positive) experiences favoring the former (latter). We find that partners with an uncooperative (cooperative) experience exhibit lower (higher) goodwill trust in the new partner when controls are more precise. Further, prior experience moderates the indirect relation between the precision of monitoring controls and partner cooperation acting through goodwill trust. The results demonstrate the importance of prior experiences in the design of interfirm controls for current partner relationships.

The role of implicit learning and cue ambiguity on the subjective experience of affective predictions: a follow-up behavioral investigation.

People use their previous experience to predict present affective events. Since we live in ever-changing environments, affective predictions must generalize from past contexts (from which they are implicitly learned) to new, potentially ambiguous contexts. This study investigated how past (un)certain relationships influence subjective experience following new ambiguous cues, and whether past relationships can be learned implicitly. Two S1-S2 paradigms were employed as learning and test phases in two experiments. S1s were colored circles, S2s negative or neutral affective pictures. Participants (N = 121, 116) were assigned to the certain (CG) or uncertain group (UG), and they were presented with 100% (CG) or 50% (UG) S1-S2 congruency during an uninstructed (Experiment 1) or implicit (Experiment 2) learning phase. During the test phase both groups were presented with a new 75% S1-S2 paradigm, and ambiguous (Experiment 1) or unambiguous (Experiment 2) S1s. Participants were asked to rate the expected valence of upcoming S2s (expectancy ratings), or their experienced valence and arousal (valence and arousal ratings). In Experiment 1 ambiguous cues elicited less negative expectancy ratings, and less unpleasant valence ratings, independently from prior experience. In Experiment 2, participants in the CG reported more negative expectancy ratings after the S1s previously paired with negative stimuli. Overall, we found that in the presence of ambiguous cues subjective affective experience is dampened, and we confirmed that people are able to infer probabilistic relationships from the environment (and to use them later) at an implicit level.