This research addresses the notion that the compatibility of skills and task demands involved in an activity elicits flow-experiences that render the activity intrinsically rewarding. We applied two experimental settings designed to test the causal impact of a skills-demands compatibility on the emergence of flow and intrinsic motivation: a playful computer game (Experiment 1) and a knowledge task (Experiment 2). Results support the balance hypothesis and indicate that compatibility of skills and task demands results in a flow-experience, irrespective of the type of activity. This demonstrates the generalizability of flow-experiences across two qualitatively different types of activities. Going beyond prior research, the results of Experiment 2 reveal that flow-experiences foster the willingness to reengage in the activity in a free choice setting, which represents a behavioral measure of intrinsic motivation.

Due to the increasing amount of scientific work and the typical delays in publication, promptly assessing the impact of scholarly work is a huge challenge. To meet this challenge, one solution may be to create and discover innovative indicators. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether Facebook likes for unpublished manuscripts that are uploaded to the Internet could be used as an early indicator of the future impact of the scientific work. To address our research question, we compared Facebook likes for manuscripts uploaded to the Harvard Business School website (Study 1) and the bioRxiv website (Study 2) with traditional impact indicators (journal article citations, Impact Factor, Immediacy Index) for those manuscripts that have been published as a journal article. Although based on our full sample of Study 1 (N = 170), Facebook likes do not predict traditional impact indicators, for manuscripts with one or more Facebook likes (n = 95), our results indicate that the more Facebook likes a manuscript receives, the more journal article citations the manuscript receives. In additional analyses (for which we categorized the manuscripts as psychological and non-psychological manuscripts), we found that the significant prediction of citations stems from the psychological and not the non-psychological manuscripts. In Study 2, we observed that Facebook likes (N = 270) and non-zero Facebook likes (n = 84) do not predict traditional impact indicators. Taken together, our findings indicate an interdisciplinary difference in the predictive value of Facebook likes, according to which Facebook likes only predict citations in the psychological area but not in the non-psychological area of business or in the field of life sciences. Our paper contributes to understanding the possibilities and limits of the use of social media indicators as potential early indicators of the impact of scientific work.

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Human observers are extremely adept at correctly interpreting the visual input that they receive despite its inherent ambiguity. There are, however, situations in which no single, valid interpretation exists and perception oscillates. Such situations offer insight into the processes underlying perception, as they reveal the conditions under which our percept can alter in the presence of an unchanging physical stimulus. Many studies have focused on perceptual switching during binocular and monocular rivalry, or when viewing ambiguous figures. The majority of these studies have focused on bistable phenomena. In this paper we report the study of a range of ambiguous stimuli that provoke tristable perception, thereby providing a more exacting test bed for current models. We find that subjects spontaneously move from periods of bistable to tristable perception and that this results in a characteristic change in the rate of perceptual switching. In contrast to reports for bistable stimuli, we find only weak evidence for consistency in the relative switch rates of individuals across our test stimuli and explain why our results are inconsistent with the theory of interhemispheric switching. We go on to describe how the results are, instead, largely consistent with models of rivalry based on mutual inhibition and adaptation.

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