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Individuals use the internet to look up information. This has consequences for the measurement of political knowledge in self-administered online surveys. Online surveys may now include answers that were retrieved from the internet instead of a respondent's declarative memory, thereby distorting knowledge measures. This problem has been acknowledged and studied, but existing research focuses on interventions designed to deter online searching and on methods to detect the behavior. I take a different approach and focus on the questions themselves to show that some questions are more vulnerable to bias via internet searching than others. I take advantage of interview mode differences in the 2016 ANES to examine the effect of internet access on different kinds of political knowledge questions. The study concludes with best practices recommendations for researchers wishing to improve their knowledge scales by discussing what type of questions are most likely to form a scale that retains criterion validity in the online environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that feedback improves behavior, but the mechanisms behind this improvement remain unclear. Different theories postulate that feedback has either a direct effect on performance through automatic reinforcement mechanisms or only an indirect effect mediated by a deliberate change in strategy. To adjudicate between these competing accounts, we performed two large experiments on human adults (total N = 518); approximately half the participants received trial-by-trial feedback on a perceptual task, whereas the other half did not receive any feedback. We found that feedback had no effect on either perceptual or metacognitive sensitivity even after 7 days of training. On the other hand, feedback significantly affected participants' response strategies by reducing response bias and improving confidence calibration. These results suggest that the beneficial effects of feedback stem from allowing people to adjust their strategies for performing the task and not from direct reinforcement mechanisms, at least in the domain of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans exhibit substantial biases in their decision making even in simple two-choice tasks, but the origin of these biases remains unclear. I hypothesized that one source of bias could be individual differences in sensory encoding. Specifically, if one stimulus category gives rise to an internal-evidence distribution with higher variability, then responses should optimally be biased against that stimulus category. Therefore, response bias may reflect a previously unappreciated subject-to-subject difference in the variance of the internal-evidence distributions. I tested this possibility by analyzing data from three different two-choice tasks (n s = 443, 443, and 498). For all three tasks, response bias moved in the direction of the optimal criterion determined by each subject's idiosyncratic internal-evidence variability. These results demonstrate that seemingly random variations in response bias can be driven by individual differences in sensory encoding and are thus partly explained by normative strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a philosophical proposition of elucidating creativity by means of distinguishing the category of intentionality. The intentional dimension of cognitive content encompasses predispositions for constructing sign systems. Such an intellectual modification of sign systems forms the foundation of dynamic creative acts. However, creative processes are not restricted to the sphere of intellectual operations, but also remain under the influence of object categories. For this reason, the results of creative processes must allow for the potential determinants of sensual matter. A transition between the subjective sphere of possibility and the objective sphere of potency indicates the dynamism of the process. A crucial component of the emergence of intentional relations is formulating the criterion of a creative process. It determines the rules of constructing sign systems, the forms of acceptable transformations as well as the possible modes of allowing for the results of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on Criterion Collection with an assortment of additional items such as audio commentaries, video essays, interviews, television segments, and trailers. Topics include navigating multiple hardships including the sexism and patriarchy of rural community and the harshness of family home; and humongous refinery being constructed where fishing boats, modest homes, little businesses, and a pristine waterfront prevail.