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• Vaccine skepticism is related to misjudgments of risk probabilities. • Participants estimated fatality frequencies of rare and common fatality types. • Estimation performance was negatively related to vaccine skepticism. • This was not so when they estimated non-mortality related statistics. • Exploratory analyses suggest vaccine skeptics use different estimation strategies. Vaccines have prevented and nearly eliminated several deadly diseases, yet they face skepticism from the public. One potential driver of vaccine skepticism is how people process event frequencies such as rare adverse reactions to vaccines. Misestimations may distort the perceived risks of vaccinating. The current study examined how vaccine skepticism is related to accuracy in event frequency processing. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 158) estimated the frequencies of several vital statistics (e.g., 'How many people die per year in the U.S. from emphysema?'). Higher levels of vaccine skepticism were associated with lower accuracy in frequency estimation and over-estimation of rare events. In Experiment 2 (n = 109), we again found that vaccine skepticism was negatively associated with vital statistic estimation accuracy but not for emotionally neutral or positive events. These results suggest that vaccine skepticism may arise from basic individual differences in processing events associated with mortality or negative affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• People view foods made with technologies as riskier and less positive. • Lateral prefrontal cortex tracks perceptions of risk for food technology topics. • Medial prefrontal cortex tracks positive attitudes for food technology topics. • Brain activation predicts risk perception and attitude change for hormones and GMOs. Food technologies provide numerous benefits to society and are extensively vetted for safety. However, many technological innovations still face high levels of skepticism from consumers. To promote development and use of food technologies, it is critical to understand the psychological and neurobiological processes associated with consumer acceptability concerns. The current study uses a neuroscience-based approach to understand consumer attitudes and perceptions of risk associated with food technologies and investigate how such attitudes impact consumer's processing of information related to food technologies. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activation while participants processed infographics related to food technology topics. For technology topics perceived as riskier (antibiotics and hormones), activation was higher in areas of the lateral prefrontal cortex that are associated with decisional uncertainty. In contrast, technology topics that were viewed more favorably (sustainability and animal welfare) tended to activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region that processes positive affect and subjective value. Moreover, for information about hormones, the lateral PFC activation was associated with individual differences in resistance to change in risk perception. These results reveal how attitudes and risk perception relate to how the brain processes information about food technologies and how people respond to information about such technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]