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As technology advances, people increasingly outsource cognitive tasks and can more easily access others' knowledge. While externalized aids often support human abilities, they may also make it more difficult for people to assess their own competence. Indeed, using online search engines leads people to treat searchable information as if they already know it (Fisher et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2015, 144, 674). Six primary and two supplemental studies (N = 3,262) extend previous research by exploring how illusions of knowledge result from reliance on other agents. After teaming with knowledgeable partners (artificially intelligent agents or human teammates) on a trivia quiz, people overestimated how well they would perform on future quizzes for which help was not available; this bias was not evident for participants who never received help. Moreover, overconfidence was insensitive to whether assistance was provided on hard versus easy problems, or even whether the assistance was accurate. Receiving outside assistance creates an ambiguity regarding who deserves credit for success or blame for failure. When this ambiguity is removed, people become better calibrated. These results indicate that reliance on technology and outside knowledge may change our view of ourselves-convincing us we are more capable than we really are. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive ability consists not only of one’s internal competence but also of the augmentation offered by the outside world. How much of our cognitive success is due to our own abilities, and how much is due to external support? Can we accurately draw that distinction? Here, we explored when and why people are unaware of their reliance on outside assistance. Across eight experiments ( N = 2,440 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk), people showed improved metacognitive calibration when assistance occurred after a delay or required active choice. Furthermore, these findings apply across a wide range of cognitive tasks, including semantic memory (Experiments 1a and 1b), episodic memory (Experiments 2a and 2b), and problem solving (Experiments 3a–3d). These experiments offer important insights into how we understand our own abilities when we rely on outside help.

While the human visual system is sensitive to numerosity, the mechanisms that allow perception to extract and represent the number of objects in a scene remains unknown. Prominent theoretical approaches posit that numerosity perception emerges from passive experience with visual scenes throughout development, and that unsupervised deep neural network models mirror all characteristic behavioral features observed in participants. Here, we derive and test a novel prediction: if the visual number sense emerges from exposure to real-world scenes, then the closer a stimulus aligns with the natural statistics of the real world, the better number perception should be. But - in contrast to this prediction - we observe no such advantage (and sometimes even a notable impairment) in number perception for natural scenes compared to artificial dot displays in college-aged adults. These findings are not accounted for by the difficulty in object identification, visual clutter, the parsability of objects from the rest of the scene, or increased occlusion. This pattern of results represents a fundamental challenge to recent models of numerosity perception based in experiential learning of statistical regularities, and instead suggests that the visual number sense is attuned to abstract number of objects, independent of their underlying correlation with non-numeric features. We discuss our results in the context of recent proposals that suggest that object complexity and entropy may play a role in number perception.

People are adept at generating and evaluating explanations for events around them. But what makes for a satisfying explanation? While some scholars argue that individuals find simple explanations to be more satisfying (Lombrozo, 2007), others argue that complex explanations are preferred (Zemla, et al. 2017). Uniting these perspectives, we posit that people believe a satisfying explanation should be as complex as the event being explained-what we term the complexity matching hypothesis. Thus, individuals will prefer simple explanations for simple events, and complex explanations for complex events. Four studies provide robust evidence for the complexity-matching hypothesis. In studies 1-3, participants read scenarios and then predicted the complexity of a satisfying explanation (Study 1), generated an explanation themselves (Study 2), and evaluated explanations (Study 3). Lastly, in Study 4, we explored a different manipulation of complexity to demonstrate robustness across paradigms. We end with a discussion of mechanisms that might underlie this preference-matching phenomenon.

In this issue of Cognition , Thompson and her colleagues challenge the results from a paper we published several years ago (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). That paper demonstrated that metacognitive difficulty or disfluency can trigger more analytical thinking as measured by accuracy on several reasoning tasks. In their experiments, Thompson et al. find evidence that people process information more deeply—but not necessarily more accurately—when they experience disfluency. These results are consistent with our original theorizing, but the authors misinterpret it as counter-evidence because they suggest that accuracy (and even confidence) is a measure of deeper processing rather than a contingent outcome of such processing. We further suggest that Thompson et al. err when they discriminate between “perceptual fluency” and “answer fluency,” the former of which is an element of the latter. Thompson et al. advance research by adding reaction time as a measure of deeper cognitive processing, but we caution against misinterpreting the meaning of accuracy.

Despite the fact that the population of is rapidly aging (Ortman et al., 2014), until recently scholars of charity have largely ignored older adults. Bjalkebring et al. (2016) begin addressing this gap in the literature. By showing that increasing age is associated with stronger feelings of sympathy and compassion and that older adults are more likely to report feeling positive emotions when making donations, Bjalkebring et al. (2016) connect the literature on age-related positivity biases to the literature on philanthropy. We endorse this approach of identifying ways in which older populations differ from younger populations and exploring how those differences might inform donation behavior. Indeed, this tactic has the potential to reveal a large number of age-related differences in giving beyond those based on an age-related positivity bias. It makes sense that Bjalkebring et al. (2016) focused primarily on emotional differences between older and younger adults, as the bulk of the literature on charitable giving has shown that people often give to charity for emotional reasons, and respond more strongly to emotional (than rational) appeals for donations (e.g., Loewenstein and Small, 2007; Huber et al., 2011). In fact, there are other emotional differences aside from positivity biases that have implications for donation behavior. For example, older adults often experience greater emotional complexity—that is, experiencing positive and negative emotions together (Carstensen et al., 2011). Therefore, it may be productive to interpret the higher levels of sympathy and compassion older adults reported in Bjalkebring et al. (2016) experiment 1 through the lens of older adults' improved ability to deal with emotional complexity above and beyond any bias toward purely positive emotions. However, as important as emotion-related differences are to the study of aging and philanthropy, it is worth noting that there are also a number of cognitive factors that influence both older adults' processing of emotional information (such as manipulations of cognitive resources or goals; Reed et al., 2014; Reed and Carstensen, 2015), and giving more generally. Thus, exploring age-related cognitive differences has the potential to reveal additional insight as to how donation behavior changes across the lifespan. Aging is related to cognitive declines in processing speed (Salthouse, 1996) and working memory capacity (Hasher and Zacks, 1989). Importantly, older adults are often able to compensate for these declines by directing cognitive resources toward information of high value (Castel, 2008). Younger adults sometimes find it difficult to discriminate between high-value information and low-value information (Castel, 2008), suggesting that they may not be as effective as older adults in identifying the worthiest causes or the most impactful ways in which to give. If older adults are sensitive to value when making spending decisions, they might be more likely than younger adults to donate, especially to causes they view as important. Older adults may also be better able to effectively determine the highest-value donation in terms of efficiency, personal value, or societal outcomes (for a discussion of younger adults' errors in optimizing the value of donations, see Baron and Szymanska, 2011). Another strategy that older adults may use in light of cognitive declines is to engage in more gist-based processing, especially of monetary information (Castel, 2005). Rather than recalling exact details about studied items, older adults tend to remember general representations of those items, such as approximate value (e.g., remembering that an item costs “about $4.00” rather than “exactly $3.92”), or relative value (e.g., which item cost less than another; Flores et al., 2016). Gist-based processing may have implications for how older adults decide when, how much, and to which causes they donate. If older adults make charitable giving decisions using gist, they may derive warm glow simply from the act of giving, irrespective of the exact dollar amount they donated. Younger adults' more accurate memory for exact prices may lead to different emotional responses to donations of different dollar amounts (for a discussion of the function mapping giving to utility in younger adults, see Strahilavitz, 2011). Furthermore, one of the most widespread “take home” messages that practitioners have derived from the scientific literature on philanthropy is that people are more likely to give (and give larger amounts) when presented with specific, tangible information about a charity's outcomes, as compared to more general information (e.g., giving a milking cow to a particular family, as opposed to general “poverty alleviation”; Cryder et al., 2013). If older adults process information using gist, their giving behavior may be less affected by tangibility than younger adults, as specific details may be lost in favor of a gist-based representation. In other words, common strategies for charitable appeals may be less effective on older populations. Scholars should also pay attention to a number of philanthropy-relevant demographic differences across age groups. For example, older adults' net worth is significantly higher on average than younger adults' (Taylor et al., 2011), and income is a major factor in charitable giving (Gittell and Tebaldi, 2006; Choi and Chou, 2010). Similarly, religious participation has been positively correlated with giving behavior (Jackson et al., 1995) and may be related to age (Davie and Vincent, 1998). These demographic differences are worth considering both because they themselves may be interesting avenues for exploring age-related differences in donation behavior, but also because they represent potential confounds in (inherently quasi-experimental) investigations on how aging affects giving. As noted by Bjalkebring et al. (2016), these sorts of confounds can make it difficult to distinguish between influences of aging, per se, and cohort effects. In sum, findings by Bjalkebring et al. (2016) demonstrate how cognitive aging can influence charitable decision making and serve as motivation for many future avenues of exploration, including how emotional complexity, subjective value, and gist-based processing may affect charitable giving in younger and older adults. Established theories of cognitive aging can be a fruitful source of novel questions about how donation behavior changes across the lifespan, and may have applications for developing charitable appeals aimed at a rapidly increasing segment of the population.

Previous research has shown that disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations – leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.

What makes a good explanation? We examine the function of latent scope, i.e., the number of unobserved phenomena that an explanation can account for. We show that individuals prefer narrow latent scope explanations-those that account for fewer unobserved effects-to broader explanations. In Experiments 1a-d, participants found narrow latent scope explanations to be both more satisfying and more likely. In Experiment 2 we directly manipulated base rate information and again found a preference for narrow latent scope explanations. Participants in Experiment 3 evaluated more natural explanations of unexpected observations, and again displayed a bias for narrow latent scope explanations. We conclude by considering what this novel bias tells us about how humans evaluate explanations and engage in causal reasoning.

Understanding when people reveal unfavorable information about themselves is both practically and theoretically important. Existing research suggests that people tend not to adopt stable disclosure strategies, and consequently disclose too much information in some situations (e.g., embarrassing personal information on Face-book) and too little in other situations (e.g., risky sexual behavior to a physician during diagnosis of a possible sexually transmitted disease). We sought to identify a domain-general cue that predicts self-disclosure patterns. We found that metacognitive ease, or fluency, promoted greater disclosure, both in tightly controlled lab studies (Studies 1a, 1b, and 3) and in an ecologically valid on-line field study (Study 4). Disfluency tended to prime thoughts and emotions associated with risk, which might be one reason why people who experience disfluency are less comfortable with self-disclosure (Studies 2 and 3). We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theory and clinical practice.

People tend to believe that sequences of random events produce fewer and shorter streaks than is actually the case. Although this error has been demonstrated repeatedly and in many forms, nearly all studies of randomness cognition have focused on how people think about random events occurring in the present or future. This article examines how our biased beliefs about randomness interact with properties of memory to influence our judgments about and memory for past random events. We explore this interaction by examining how beliefs about randomness affect our memory for random events and how certain properties of memory alter our tendency to categorize events as random. Across three experiments, we demonstrate an interaction between randomness cognition and three well-established but distinct properties of memory: (1) the reconstructive nature of memory, (2) primacy and recency effects, and (3) duration neglect. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Fluency - the subjective experience of ease or difficulty associated with completing a mental task - has been shown to be an influential cue in a wide array of judgments. Recently researchers have begun to look at how fluency impacts judgment through more subtle and indirect routes. Fluency impacts whether information is represented in working memory and what aspects of that information are attended to. Additionally, fluency has an impact in strategy selection; depending on how fluent information is, people engage in qualitatively different cognitive operations. This suggests that the role of fluency is more nuanced than previously believed and that understanding fluency could be of critical importance to understanding cognition more generally.

Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency--receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficult-to-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one's brow (Experiment 3)--reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4). Metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency appear to serve as an alarm that activates analytic forms of reasoning that assess and sometimes correct the output of more intuitive forms of reasoning.

For decades, the dominant paradigm for studying decision making—the expected utility framework—has been burdened by an increasing number of empirical findings that question its validity as a model of human cognition and behavior. However, as Kuhn (1962) argued in his seminal discussion of paradigm shifts, an old paradigm cannot be abandoned until a new paradigm emerges to replace it. In this article, we argue that the recent shift in researcher attention toward basic cognitive processes that give rise to decision phenomena constitutes the beginning of that replacement paradigm. Models grounded in basic perceptual, attentional, memory, and aggregation processes have begun to proliferate. The development of this new approach closely aligns with Kuhn's notion of paradigm shift, suggesting that this is a particularly generative and revolutionary time to be studying decision science.

We review the literature on the hot hand fallacy by highlighting the positive and negative aspects of hot hand research over the past 20 years, and suggesting new avenues of research. Many researchers have focused on criticising Gilovich et al.'s claim that the hot hand fallacy exists in basketball and other sports, instead of exploring the general implications of the hot hand fallacy for human cognition and probabilistic reasoning. Noting that researchers have shown that people perceive hot streaks in a gambling domain in which systematic streaks cannot possibly exist, we suggest that researchers have paid too much attention to investigating the independence of outcomes in various sporting domains. Instead, we advocate a domain-general mechanistic approach to understanding the hot hand fallacy, and conclude by suggesting approaches that might refocus the literature on the important general implications of the hot hand fallacy for human probabilistic reasoning.

Three studies investigated the impact of the psychological principle of fluency (that people tend to prefer easily processed information) on short-term share price movements. In both a laboratory study and two analyses of naturalistic real-world stock market data, fluently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term. For example, in one study, an initial investment of 1,000 US dollars yielded a profit of 112 US dollars more after 1 day of trading for a basket of fluently named shares than for a basket of disfluently named shares. These results imply that simple, cognitive approaches to modeling human behavior sometimes outperform more typical, complex alternatives.

The ‘fast and frugal’ approach to reasoning (Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press) claims that individuals use non-compensatory strategies in judgment – the idea that only one cue is taken into account in reasoning. The simplest and most important of these heuristics postulates that judgment sometimes relies solely on recognition. However, the studies that have investigated usage of the recognition heuristic have confounded recognition with other cues that could also lead to similar judgments. This paper tests whether mere recognition is actually driving the findings in support of the recognition heuristic. Two studies provide evidence that judgments do not conform to the recognition heuristic when these confounds are accounted for. Implications for the study of simple heuristics are discussed.

Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

In this issue of Cognition, Thompson and her colleagues challenge the results from a paper we published several years ago (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley,Eyre, 2007). That paper demonstrated that metacognitive difficulty or disfluency can trigger more analytical thinking as measured by accuracy on several reasoning tasks. In their experiments, Thompson et al. find evidence that people process information more deeply-but not necessarily more accurately-when they experience disfluency. These results are consistent with our original theorizing, but the authors misinterpret it as counter-evidence because they suggest that accuracy (and even confidence) is a measure of deeper processing rather than a contingent outcome of such processing. We further suggest that Thompson et al. err when they discriminate between "perceptual fluency" and "answer fluency," the former of which is an element of the latter. Thompson et al. advance research by adding reaction time as a measure of deeper cognitive processing, but we caution against misinterpreting the meaning of accuracy.

Models of cue weighting in judgment have typically focused on how decision-makers weight cues individually. Here, the authors propose that people might recognize and weight groups of cues. They examine how judgments change when decision-makers focus on cues individually or as parts of groups. Several experiments demonstrate that people can spontaneously pack information into cue groups. Moreover, group-level weighting depends on how people assess similarity or how they think of categorical hierarchies.

An illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) occurs when people believe they understand a concept more deeply than they actually do. To date, IOEDs have been identified only in mechanical and natural domains, occluding why they occur and suggesting that their implications are quite limited. Six studies illustrated that IOEDs occur because people adopt an inappropriately abstract construal style when they assess how well they understand concrete concepts. As this mechanism predicts, participants who naturally adopted concrete construal styles (Study 1) or were induced to adopt a concrete construal style (Studies 2-4 and 6), experienced diminished IOEDs. Two additional studies documented a novel IOED in the social psychological domain of electoral voting (Studies 5 and 6), demonstrating the generality of the construal mechanism, the authors also extended the presumed boundary conditions of the effect beyond mechanical and natural domains. These findings suggest a novel factor that might contribute to such diverse social-cognitive shortcomings as stereotyping, egocentrism, and the planning fallacy, where people adopt abstract representations of concepts that should be represented concretely.

Previous research has shown that disfluency--the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations - leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.

Processing fluency, or the subjective experience of ease with which people process information, reliably influences people’s judgments across a broad range of social dimensions. Experimenters have manipulated processing fluency using a vast array of techniques, which, despite their diversity, produce remarkably similar judgmental consequences. For example, people similarly judge stimuli that are semantically primed (conceptual fluency), visually clear (perceptual fluency), and phonologically simple (linguistic fluency) as more true than their less fluent counterparts. The authors offer the first comprehensive review of such mechanisms and their implications for judgment and decision making. Because every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience, the authors argue that fluency is a ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment.

Oppenheimer’s (2004) demonstration that causal discounting (when the presence of one cause casts doubt on the presence of another) can happen spontaneously addressed the standing concern that discounting was an artifact of experimental demands, but these results could have resulted from memory inhibition. The present studies rule out this alternative using the same surname frequency estimation paradigm. In Study 1, individuals discounted surname familiarity even when it could be attributed to semantic meaning; in Study 2, participants under cognitive load discounted less; in Study 3, participants who were promised a prize for accuracy discounted more. All three results conform to a spontaneous causal discounting account better than to the inhibition alternative.

People construe the world along a continuum from concretely (focusing on specific, local details) to abstractly (focusing on global essences). We show that people are more likely to interpret the world abstractly when they experience cognitive disfluency, or difficulty processing stimuli in the environment, than when they experience cognitive fluency. We observed this effect using three instantiations of fluency: visual perceptual fluency (Study 1b), conceptual priming fluency (Study 2b), and linguistic fluency (Study 3). Adopting the framework of construal theory, we suggest that one mechanism for this effect is perceivers' tendency to interpret disfluently processed stimuli as farther from their current position than fluently processed stimuli (Studies 1a and 2a).

Research has shown that judgments tend to assimilate to irrelevant "anchors." We extend anchoring effects to show that anchors can even operate across modalities by, apparently, priming a general sense of magnitude that is not moored to any unit or scale. An initial study showed that participants drawing long "anchor" lines made higher numerical estimates of target lengths than did those drawing shorter lines. We then replicated this finding, showing that a similar pattern was obtained even when the target estimates were not in the dimension of length. A third study showed that an anchor's length relative to its context, and not its absolute length, is the key to predicting the anchor's impact on judgments. A final study demonstrated that magnitude priming (priming a sense of largeness or smallness) is a plausible mechanism underlying the reported effects. We conclude that the boundary conditions of anchoring effects may be much looser than previously thought, with anchors operating across modalities and dimensions to bias judgment.

Discounting is a causal-reasoning phenomenon in which increasing confidence in the likelihood of a particular cause decreases confidence in the likelihood of all other causes. This article provides evidence that individuals apply discounting principles to making causal attributions about internal cognitive states. In particular, the three studies reported show that individuals will fail to use the availability heuristic in frequency estimations when salient causal explanations for availability exist. Experiment 1 shows that fame is used as a cue for discounting in estimates of surname frequency. Experiment 2 demonstrates that individuals discount the availability of their own last name. Experiment 3, which used individuals' initials in a letter-frequency estimation task, demonstrates that simple priming of alternative causal models leads to discounting of availability. Discounting of cognitive states can occur spontaneously, even when alternative causal models are never explicitly provided.