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ABSTRACTThis paper introduces a conceptual synthesis of theoretical ideas investigating the relationship between decision making and mental imagery. We claim that the generation of mental images may play a pivotal role in decision making because imaginative foresight allows an event to be pre-experienced and consequences of different choice alternatives to be “tried out.” Moreover, we provide evidence that mental imagery can be considered a source of emotions that regulate decision making and risk perception. We also propose principles describing the mutual relationships between mental imagery and decision making that allow for formulating testable hypotheses. Finally, we discuss open issues that arise in the context of the idea that mental imagery informs decision making. They concern the relationship between mental imagery and emotions, functional and dysfunctional consequences of mental imagery, spontaneous vs. enforced generation of mental imagery, and the role of imagery-based approach/withdrawal motivation in terminating the decision-making process.

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance (p< .05), we found that 15 (54%) of the replications provided evidence of a statistically significant effect in the same direction as the original finding. With a strict significance criterion (p< .0001), 14 (50%) of the replications still provided such evidence, a reflection of the extremely high-powered design. Seven (25%) of the replications yielded effect sizes larger than the original ones, and 21 (75%) yielded effect sizes smaller than the original ones. The median comparable Cohen’s ds were 0.60 for the original findings and 0.15 for the replications. The effect sizes were small (< 0.20) in 16 of the replications (57%), and 9 effects (32%) were in the direction opposite the direction of the original effect. Across settings, the Qstatistic indicated significant heterogeneity in 11 (39%) of the replication effects, and most of those were among the findings with the largest overall effect sizes; only 1 effect that was near zero in the aggregate showed significant heterogeneity according to this measure. Only 1 effect had a tau value greater than .20, an indication of moderate heterogeneity. Eight others had tau values near or slightly above .10, an indication of slight heterogeneity. Moderation tests indicated that very little heterogeneity was attributable to the order in which the tasks were performed or whether the tasks were administered in lab versus online. Exploratory comparisons revealed little heterogeneity between Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures and less WEIRD cultures (i.e., cultures with relatively high and low WEIRDness scores, respectively). Cumulatively, variability in the observed effect sizes was attributable more to the effect being studied than to the sample or setting in which it was studied.

Expected utility theory posits that our preferences for gambles result from the weighting of utilities of monetary payoffs by their probabilities. However, recent studies have shown that combining payoffs and probabilities is often distorted by affective responses. In the current study, we hypothesized that affective response to a lottery prize moderates processing of payoffs and probabilities. Attentional engagement (measured by the number of fixations in the eye tracking experiment) was predicted by probability, value of an outcome, and their interaction, but only for affect-poor lottery tickets. A corresponding pattern of results was not observed in affect-rich lottery tickets, suggesting more simplified processing of such lotteries.

The study investigated whether the strength of the relationship between attentional and implicit-memory biases for threat-related material can be moderated by individual differences in temperament and personality. A spatial cueing task, where task-irrelevant angry, happy, and neutral faces acted as spatial cues preceding a target, was immediately followed by an unexpected “old/new” task involving previously presented faces. Temperament-based emotional reactivity (ER; one's typical response strength to emotional stimuli) predicted improved memory performance for angry faces in the “old/new” task. Critically, the relationship between the attentional bias towards threat (indexed by a cue validity index, i.e., a difference in response times on trials where cues with angry expression were presented in the same versus different location to the subsequent target) and enhanced implicit-memory for previously presented task-irrelevant threat-related information was found to be moderated by ER. The current findings provide the first evidence that temperament traits can offer novel insights into the mechanisms enhancing cognitive biases towards threat in the typical population.