Lois Allen – författare

This is a volume of previously unpublished research studies that were conducted during the Management in the 1990s project at the Sloan School of MIT. It is a companion volume to the principal book of the project, The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation. This book is organized into three sections: the IT Revolution; Strategic Options; and The Organization and Management Response. Authors of the studies are among the most prominent of the Sloan School people, including Eric Von Hippel, Edgar Schein, Michael Piore, Paul Osterman, and Thomas Kochan. There are introductions to the volume and to the sections.

This volume contains papers in the broadly defined area of microeconomic theory presented to the International Economic Association Tenth World Congress in Moscow. A wide range of topics is represented - from the foundations of economic choice through strategic behaviour, multiple market interactions, and asymmetric information to applications in such diverse areas as the internal organization of firms, patent policy, product markets, and labour supply, finishing with a piece on the history of oligopoly theory. The collection strongly suggests that microeconomic theory is indeed thriving as a fascinating and useful central part of economic science.

Component cognitive processes have played a critical role in the development of experimental aging research and theory in psychology as attested by articles published on this theme. However, in the last five to ten years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of articles attempting to isolate a single factor (or small subset of factors) responsible for age differences in information processing. This view of aging is frequently termed the complexity model of the generalized slowing model, the primary assumption being that age differences in cognition are due simply to a relatively larger performance decrement on the part of older adults (compared to younger adults) as task complexity increases. Because generalized complexity theorists have questioned the utility of using component cognitive processes as theoretical constructs, the editors feel it is time to restate why component cognitive processes are critical to any thorough understanding of age differences in cognition. Thus the present edited volume represents an attempt to demonstrate the utility of the process-specific approach to cognitive aging. Central to this effort are illustrations of how regression analyses may provide evidence for general slowing by maximizing explained variance while at the same time obscuring local sources of variance.

The book concentrates on age differences in word and language processing, because these factors relate to reading which is a critical cognitive process used in everyday life. Furthermore, age differences in word and language processing illustrate the importance of taking component cognitive processes into consideration. The breadth of coverage of the book attests to the wide range of cognitive processes involved in word and language processing.