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Genetic essentialism is a set of beliefs holding that certain categories have a heritable, intrinsic, and biological basis. The current studies explore people's genetic essentialist beliefs about criminality, how such essentialism relates to beliefs about appropriate punishment, and the kinds of judgments and motivations that underlie these associations. Study 1 validated a novel task, in which respondents estimated how possible it would be for a child to inherit criminal behavior from a sperm donor with whom they had no contact. Studies 2-4 used this task to address how genetic essentialist beliefs related to the harmfulness of a crime and the harshness of recommended punishment. Results indicated a tendency to essentialize both low- and high-harm crimes, though genetic essentialism was higher for more harmful crimes. Moreover, genetic essentialist beliefs predicted recommendations for harsher punishments, with retributive and protective motivations, as well as perceptions of recidivism risk, partially mediating this association. Further, Studies 3 and 4 found that genetic essentialism positively predicted support for harsh punishments such as the death penalty, as well as support for directing financial resources more toward law enforcement and less toward social support. Lay theories about criminality may have profound implications for decisions about appropriate punishment for wrongdoers, as well as broader policy decisions about crime, punishment, and resource allocation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Forensic feature-comparison examiners compare-or "match"-evidence samples (e.g., fingerprints) to provide judgments about the source of the evidence. Research demonstrates that examiners in select disciplines possess expertise in this task by outperforming novices-yet the psychological mechanisms underpinning this expertise are unclear. This article investigates one implicated mechanism: statistical learning, the ability to learn how often things occur in the environment. This ability is likely important in forensic decision-making as samples sharing rarer statistical information are more likely to come from the same source than those sharing more common information. We investigated 46 fingerprint examiners' and 52 novices' statistical learning of fingerprint categories and application of this knowledge in a source-likelihood judgment task. Participants completed four measures of their statistical learning (frequency discrimination judgments, bounded and unbounded frequency estimates, and source-likelihood judgments) before and after familiarization to the "ground-truth" category frequencies. Compared to novices, fingerprint examiners had superior domain-specific statistical learning across all measures-both before and after familiarization. This suggests that fingerprint expertise facilitates domain-specific statistical learning-something that has important theoretical and applied implications for the development of training programs and statistical databases in forensic science. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

According to the semantic primacy hypothesis of emotion generation, stimuli must be semantically categorized to evoke emotions. This hypothesis was tested for the subjective component of emotions in four chronometric experiments in which the conscious recognition of emotion-eliciting objects and the onset of affect was timed using temporal order judgments (TOJs, Exp. 1a, 1b, and 3) and simultaneity judgments (SJs, Exp. 2). Participants viewed pictures that elicited pleasant or unpleasant feelings. At varying intervals before and after picture onset, a visual probe stimulus was presented. In separate blocks of trials, the participants judged when they recognized the object shown in the picture and noticed the feeling evoked by the picture: Before or after the probe (TOJs), or simultaneously/not simultaneously with the probe (SJs). Psychometric functions were fitted to the data of the individual participants to determine the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) of the target events and the probe. In both tasks, the mean PSS of affect occurred significantly later than the PSS of object recognition, with an average delay of about 120 ms. A positive lag between object recognition and affect was found for nearly all participants and pictures. In addition, the latencies of object recognition and affect were positively correlated. The found temporal order of object recognition and affect is consistent with the findings of previous studies using speeded reaction time tasks. Implications of the findings for the cognition-emotion debate and for bodily feedback theories of emotional experience are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In recognition memory, anything that is objectively new is necessarily not-old, and anything that is objectively old is necessarily not-new. Therefore, judging whether a test item is new is logically equivalent to judging whether it is old, and conversely. Nevertheless, a series of 10 experiments showed that old? and new? judgments did not produce equivalent recognition accuracy. In Experiments 1-4, wherein subjects made old? or new? judgments about test items, new? judgments yielded more accurate performance for old items than old? judgments did, and old? judgments yielded more accurate performance for new items than new? judgments did. This same violation of logical equivalence was observed in Experiments 5-10, wherein subjects made similar? judgments as well as old? and new? ones. In short, old? and new? judgments displayed consistent Judgment × Item crossovers, rather than equivalence. Response latencies were used to test the hypothesis that Judgment × Item crossovers were due to certain judgment-item combinations provoking more deliberate, thorough retrieval than other combinations. There was no support for that hypothesis, but the data were consistent with an earlier theory, which posits that latency depends on the extent to which judgments or items slant retrieval toward accessing verbatim traces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

We ask whether moral judgment in preschool children observes a "means principle." It is well established that young children consider both the consequences and the goals of actions when making moral judgments; much less studied is the question of whether the

Much recent research and theorizing in the field of reasoning has been concerned with intuitive sensitivity to logical validity, such as the logic-brightness effect, in which logically valid arguments are judged to have a "brighter" typeface than invalid arguments. We propose and test a novel signal competition account of this phenomenon. Our account makes two assumptions: (a) as per the demands of the logic-brightness task, people attempt to find a perceptual signal to guide brightness judgments, but (b) when the perceptual signal is hard to discern, they instead attend to cues such as argument validity. Experiment 1 tested this account by manipulating the difficulty of the perceptual contrast. When contrast discrimination was relatively difficult, we replicated the logic-brightness effect. When the discrimination was easy, the effect was eliminated. Experiment 2 manipulated the ambiguity of the perceptual task, comparing discrimination performance when the perceptual contrast was labeled in terms of rating "brightness" or "darkness". When the less ambiguous darkness labeling was used, there was no evidence of a logic-brightness effect. In both experiments, individual sensitivity to the perceptual discrimination was negatively correlated with sensitivity to argument validity. Hierarchical latent mixture modeling revealed distinct individual strategies: responses based on perceptual cues, responses based on validity or guessing. Consistent with the signal competition account, the proportion of those responding to validity increased with perceptual discrimination difficulty or task ambiguity. The results challenge explanations of the logic-brightness effect based on parallel dual-process models of reasoning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Space and time mutually influence each other such that space affects time estimation (space-on-time effect), and conversely (time-on-space effect). These reciprocal interferences suggest that space and time are intrinsically linked in the human mind. Yet, recent evidence for an asymmetrical advantage for space over time challenges the classical theoretical interpretation. In the present study, we tested whether the superiority of space over time in magnitude interference depends on the cognitive resources engaged in the spatial task. We conducted three experiments in which participants performed judgments on temporal intervals and spatial distances in separate blocks. In each trial, two dots were successively flashed at various locations, and participants were to judge whether the duration or distance between the dots was short or long. To manipulate cognitive demands in the spatial task, distances varied across experiments (highly discriminable for the non-demanding spatial task in Experiment 1 and scarcely discriminable for the demanding spatial task in Experiment 2). Importantly, this manipulation tended to enhance perceptual sensitivity (as indexed by Weber Ratios) but slowed down the decision process (as indexed by response times) in the demanding experiment. Our results provide evidence for robust space-on-time and time-on-space effects (Experiments 1 and 2). More crucially, the involvement of cognitive resources in a demanding spatial task causes a massive time-on-space effect: Spatial judgments are indeed more influenced by irrelevant temporal information than the reverse (Experiments 2 and 3). Overall, the flexibility of spatiotemporal interferences has direct theoretical implications and questions the origins of space-time interaction.

Despite many research efforts dedicated toward deciphering the functional architecture underlying metacognition, it is still unclear if there is a common metacognitive resource for different functional requirements. Here, using laboratory measures of metacognition across several domains in a large sample (

Visual scenes are often remembered as if they were observed from a different viewpoint. Some scenes are remembered as farther than they appeared, and others as closer. These memory distortions-also known as boundary extension and contraction-are strikingly consistent for a given scene, but their cause remains unknown. We tested whether these distortions can be explained by an inferential process that adjusts scene memories toward high-probability views, using viewing depth as a test case. We first carried out a large-scale analysis of depth maps of natural indoor scenes to quantify the statistical probability of views in depth. We then assessed human observers' memory for these scenes at various depths and found that viewpoint judgments were consistently biased toward the modal depth, even when just a few seconds elapsed between viewing and reporting. Thus, scenes closer than the modal depth showed a boundary-extension bias (remembered as farther-away), and scenes farther than the modal depth showed a boundary-contraction bias (remembered as closer). By contrast, scenes at the modal depth did not elicit a consistent bias in either direction. This same pattern of results was observed in a follow-up experiment using tightly controlled stimuli from virtual environments. Together, these findings show that scene memories are biased toward statistically probable views, which may serve to increase the accuracy of noisy or incomplete scene representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Healthy aging is associated with decline in social, emotion, and identity perception, which is frequently attributed to deterioration of structures involved in social inference. It is believed that this decline is unlikely to be a result of perceptual aberrations due to intact (corrected) visual acuity. Nevertheless, the present studies examine whether more particular perceptual aberrations may be present in healthy aging, that could in principle contribute to such difficulties. The present study examined the possibility that particular deficits in configural processing impair the perception of faces in healthy aging. Across two signal detection experiments, we required a group of healthy older adults and matched younger adults to detect changes in images of faces that could differ either at the local, featural level, or in configuration of these features. In support of our hypothesis, older adults were particularly impaired in detecting configural changes, relative to detecting changes in features. The impairments were found for both upright and inverted faces and were similar in a task with images of inanimate objects (houses). Drift diffusion modelling suggested that this decline related to reduced evidence accumulation rather than a tendency to make configural judgments based on less evidence. These findings indicate that domain-general problems processing configural information contribute to the difficulties with face processing in healthy aging, and may in principle contribute to a range of higher-level social difficulties - with implications also for other groups exhibiting similar patterns in perception and understanding.

The traditional focus in the moral decision-making literature has been on understanding when and why people choose a utilitarian option versus a deontological option. However, we suggest that when deciding between these two options, people prefer a third option: to seek out others' advice-which raises the question, what advice do people give others who are faced with a moral dilemma? In a meta-analysis of responses to 50 unique moral dilemmas, furnished by undergraduates, online panelists, and passers-by, we compared 8,696 self-choice responses (from participants who decided what option they choose) with 8,548 advisor responses (from participants who recommended what option others should choose). We found that when advising others, participants favored deontological options more, recommending these options over the more utilitarian options that participants chose for themselves (

A recent line of research has shown that humans can keep track of the direction and magnitude of their timing errors without relying on feedback. But these studies tested temporal error monitoring explicitly by interrogating participants regarding their errors, which might have inadvertently primed the prospective coupling between the first-order timing and second-order metacognitive judgments. The current study utilized an indirect way of testing temporal error awareness while providing a strong objective incentive for maximizing the accuracy of first-order timing performance. In two experiments, participants were asked to maximize the average proximity of their time reproduction to the target by accepting or rejecting their time reproduction depending on the subjective judgment of their proximity to the target time interval. We found that participants more frequently opted out of a trial with a larger distance between their reproductions and the target time interval in both directions, forming a positive quadratic relationship with reproduced time. Resultantly, timing precision was lower in trials that participants opted out of. Our results provide new evidence in support of the temporal error-monitoring performance of human participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In item-method directed forgetting, participants study items paired with instructions to either remember or forget each item for the purpose of an upcoming memory test. Such instructions are effective, in that participants recall or recognize more remember- than forget-cued items when asked to disregard the cues at test. Recent research has shown that context and source information associated with targets at encoding are not subject to any influence of directed forgetting, such that both remember and forget items benefit equivalently from context reinstatement at test. In the present study, remember and forget items were presented by two sources, one of which presented mostly remember items and one of which presented mostly forget items. When the sources were reinstated at recognition, participants displayed more liberal responding to the mostly-remember source, such that item discriminability was actually worse compared to the mostly-forget source. When source information is reinstated at test, participants use their knowledge about the sources heuristically when making recognition judgements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Classic theories of perception, cognition, judgment, and decision making assert that people exhibit diminishing sensitivity to magnitude changes. For instance, according to the value function of prospect theory (KahnemanTversky, 1979), the pleasure of moving from 0 to $1000 is larger than the pleasure of moving from $1000 to $2000, whereas the pleasure of moving from $1000 to $2000 is larger than the pleasure of moving from $2000 to $3000. In this article, I call into question how much diminishing sensitivity actually impacts choice and the nature of the value function. I advance a special form of diminishing sensitivity that I have termed

In a pre-registered experiment, we presented participants with information about the safety of traveling during a deadly pandemic and during a migration trip using five different sources (a news article, a family member, an official organization, someone with personal experience, and the travel organizer) and four different verbal descriptions of the likelihood of safety (very likely, likely, unlikely, and very unlikely). We found that both for the pandemic and migration contexts, judgments about the likelihood of safely traveling and decisions to travel were most strongly influenced by information from the respective official organizations and that participants also indicated greater willingness to share information from official organizations with others. These results are consistent with the established finding that expert sources are more persuasive. However, we also found that, regardless of source, participants thought that it would be safe to travel even when told that it was unlikely or very unlikely to be safe. Additionally, participants did not discriminate between the grades of likelihood description (such as between likely and very likely or between unlikely and very unlikely), suggesting that in the contexts examined directionality matters much more than attempts to communicate more fine-grained likelihood information with verbal phrases.

It has been shown that the perceived duration of an object in the subsecond range is closely associated with its nontemporal perceptual properties, the mechanism under which remains unclear. Previous studies have revealed a modulatory effect of early visual feature processing on the apparent duration. Here, we further examined the relationship between perceptual confidence and subjective time by asking participants to simultaneously perform temporal and nontemporal perceptual judgments. The results revealed a significant effect on confidence levels. When participants’ confidence in judging the coherent motion direction or relative dot numerosity increases, their perceived duration of the stimulus also appears longer. These results are discussed in the context of perceptual evidence accumulation and evaluation for the decision-making of perceptual properties. They suggest a profound contribution of object processing to the computation of subjective time and provide further insights into the mechanism of event timing.

Do children, like most adults, believe that only kin and close others are obligated to help oneanother? In two studies (total N = 1140), we examined whether children (~5- to ~10-yos) andadults across five different societies consider social relationship when ascribing prosocialobligations. Contrary to the view that such discriminations are a natural default in humanreasoning, younger children in the United States (Studies 1 and 2) and across cultures (Study 2)generally judged everyone—parents, friends, and strangers—as obligated to help someone-inneed.Older children and adults, on the other hand, tended to exhibit more discriminant judgments.They considered parents more obligated to help than friends followed by strangers—though thiseffect was stronger in some cultures than others. Our findings suggest that children’s initial senseof prosocial obligation in social-relational contexts starts out broad and generally becomes moreselective over the course of development.

Verbal hints can bias perceptual decision-making, even when the information they provide is false. What makes individuals more or less susceptible to such influences, however, remains unclear. Here, we inquire whether suggestibility to social influence, a high-level trait measured by a standard suggestibility scale, could predict changes in perceptual judgments. We asked naive participants to indicate the dominant color in a series of stimuli after giving them a short, false verbal statement about which color would likely dominate. We found that this statement biased participants' perceptual judgments of the dominant color, as shown by a correlated shift of their discrimination performance, confidence judgments, and response times. Crucially, this effect was more pronounced in participants with higher levels of susceptibility to social influence. Together, these results indicate that social suggestibility can determine how much simple (albeit false) verbal hints influence perceptual judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

European Americans are self-enhancing, whereas East Asians are sometimes self-critical. However, the mechanisms underlying this cultural difference remain unclear. Here, we addressed this gap by testing 32 Taiwanese and 32 American young adults, who indicated whether their self-esteem would change in various episodes involving success or failure. We monitored their electroencephalogram (EEG) and assessed upper-alpha band power in response to the outcome information. An increase in upper-alpha power indicates internally directed attention; therefore, it is an index of self-referential processing when assessed during a judgment about the self. As predicted, Americans judged that their self-esteem (but not another's) would increase more after a success than it would decrease after a failure, thereby showing the previously observed self-enhancing pattern. Taiwanese tended to show the opposite pattern, self-criticism. Notably, Americans, but not Taiwanese, showed an increase in upper-alpha band power in response to the self's successes (vs. failures). This bias in the EEG index of self-referential processing predicted the cultural difference in self-enhancement (vs. criticism). The role of self-referential processing in self-enhancement is discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In schema-based source monitoring, people mistakenly predict better source memory for expected sources (e.g., oven in the kitchen; expectancy effect), whereas actual source memory is better for unexpected sources (e.g., hairdryer in the kitchen; inconsistency effect; Schaper et al., 2019b). In three source-monitoring experiments, the authors tested whether a delay between study and metamemory judgments remedied this metamemory expectancy illusion. Further, the authors tested whether delayed judgments were based on in-the-moment experiences of retrieval fluency or updating of belief due to experiences with one's source memory. Participants studied source-item pairs and provided metamemory judgments either at study or after delay. After delay, they made judgments either on the complete source-item pair (eliciting no source retrieval, Experiment 1) or on the item only (eliciting covert, Experiment 1, or overt source retrieval, Experiments 2 and 3). Metamemory judgments at study showed the established illusory expectancy effect, as did delayed judgments when no source retrieval was elicited. However, when participants retrieved the source prior to delayed judgments, they predicted an inconsistency effect on source memory, which concurred with actual memory. Thus, delaying judgments remedied the metamemory expectancy illusion. Results further indicate that in-the-moment experiences of retrieval fluency and updated general belief about the effect of expectancy on source memory jointly contributed to this remedial effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated to what extent people can develop global spatial representations of a multiroom environment through one-shot physical walking between rooms. In Experiment 1, the participants learned objects' locations in one room of an immersive virtual environment. They were blindfolded and led to walk to a testing position either within the same room (within-boundary) or in an adjacent novel room (across-boundary). They conducted judgments of relative direction (JRD) based on the remembered locations of objects. The participants' actual perspectives and imagined perspectives of JRD trials were manipulated to be aligned or misaligned (i.e., faced the same or opposite cardinal directions). The results showed better JRD performances for the aligned perspectives than the misaligned perspectives in the across-boundary condition; this global sensorimotor alignment effect was comparable with the effect in the within-boundary condition. Experiments 2-6 further examined global sensorimotor alignment effects after across-boundary walking. Experiments 2-3 manipulated factors related to encoding global relations (i.e., explicit instructions to attend to walking and keep track of spatial relations, and visual cues for navigational affordance to another space). Experiments 4-6 manipulated factors related to retrieving global relations in JRD (i.e., learning orientation as one imagined perspective, learning position and orientation as the imagined viewpoint, and the number of imagined perspectives). The results showed robust global sensorimotor alignment effects in all experiments, indicating that the participants updated actual headings relative to remembered objects in the other room. Global spatial updating might be the primary mechanism for developing global spatial representations of a multiscale environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Keats heuristic suggests that people find aesthetically pleasing expressions more accurate than mundane expressions. We test this notion with chiastic statements. Chiasmus is a stylistic phenomenon in which at least two linguistic constituents are repeated in reverse order, conventionally represented by the formula A-B-B-A. Our study focuses on the specific form of chiasmus known as antimetabole, in which the reverse-repeated constituents are words (e.g., “All for one and one for all;” A = all, B = one). In 3 out of 4 experiments (N = 797), we find evidence that people judge antimetabolic statements (e.g., “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”) as more accurate than semantically equivalent non-antimetabolic statements (e.g., “Success is getting what you wish. Happiness is wanting what you receive.”). Furthermore, we evaluate fluency as a potential mechanism explaining the observed accuracy benefit afforded to antimetabolic statements, finding that the increased speed (i.e., fluency) with which antimetabolic statements were processed predicted judgements of accuracy. Overall, the current work is consistent with the growing literature on stylistic factors biasing assessments of truth, using the distinctive stylistic pattern of antimetabole.

We report two experiments designed to investigate whether the presentation of a range of pleasant fragrances, containing both floral and fruity notes, would modulate people’s judgements of the facial attractiveness (Experiment 1) and age (Experiment 2) of a selection of typical female faces varying in age in the range 20–69 years. In Experiment 1, male participants rated the female faces as less attractive when presented with an unpleasant fragrance compared to clean air. The rated attractiveness of the female faces was lower when the participants rated the unpleasant odour as having a lower attractiveness and pleasantness, and a higher intensity. In Experiment 2, both male and female participants rated the age of female faces while presented with one of four pleasant fragrances or clean air as a control. Only the female participants demonstrated a crossmodal effect, with the pleasant fragrances inducing an older rating for female faces in the 40–49-years-old age range, whereas a younger rating was documented for female faces in the 60–69-years-old age range. Taken together, these results are consistent with the view that while the valence of fragrance (pleasant versus unpleasant) exerts a robust crossmodal influence over judgements of facial attractiveness, the effects of pleasant fragrance on judgements of a person’s age appear to be less reliable. One possible explanation for the differing effect of scent in the two cases relates to the fact that attractiveness judgements are more subjective, hedonic, and/or intuitive than age ratings which are more objective, cognitive-mediated, and/or analytic in nature.

Memory judgments made by an individual may be affected by the memory judgments made by another individual, a phenomenon named memory conformity. It is unclear, however, whether memory conformity affects the well demonstrated positive relationship between accuracy and confidence, and more importantly, whether it affects the accuracy of high-confidence memory judgments. Here, we investigated these possibilities in three experiments wherein participants performed recognition followed by confidence judgments of studied and novel faces, after being exposed to the recognition responses of a fictional participant whose responses could be valid or invalid (74% and 26% of the responses, respectively). In all three experiments, accuracy for high confidence "old" and "new" responses was affected by the responses of the fictitious participant, with invalid responses producing consistent decreases in high confidence accuracy. In addition, confidence-accuracy characteristics (CAC) analysis revealed that invalid responses were particularly impactful on the assignment of confidence for faces judged as "new," a pattern that sheds light on prior findings regarding the effects of cueing on mean confidence. Thus, further than demonstrating that the exposition to the memory judgments of another person affects high confidence recognition, we show that such exposition produces distinct effects on the assignment of confidence for "new" versus "old" memory judgments.

Recognizing the role that facial appearance plays in guiding social interactions, here we investigated how occlusions of the bottom-face region affect facial impressions of trustworthiness and dominance. Previous studies suggesting that different facial features impact inferences on these traits sustain the hypothesis that wearing a face mask will differently affect each trait inference. And specifically, that trustworthiness impressions will be more disrupted by this type of face occlusion than dominance impressions. In two studies, we addressed this possibility by occluding the bottom face region of faces that were previously shown to convey different levels of dominance and trustworthiness, and tested differences in the ability to discriminate between these trait levels across occlusion conditions. In Study 1 faces were occluded by a mask, and in Study 2 by a square image. In both studies, results showed that although facial occlusions generally reduced participants’ confidence on their trait judgments, the ability to discriminate facial trustworthiness was more strongly affected than the ability to discriminate facial dominance. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - FCT info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

When judging a perpetrator who harmed someone accidentally, humans rely on distinct information pertaining to the perpetrator and victim. The present study investigates how reasoning style modulates the contribution of the victim’s harm and the perpetrator’s intention to third-party judgement of accidental harm. In two pre-registered online experiments, we simultaneously manipulated harm severity and the perpetrator’s intention. Participants completed reasoning measures as well as a moral judgement task consisting of short narratives which depicted the interaction between a perpetrator and a victim. In experiment 1, we manipulated the perpetrator’s intent to harm (accidental versus intentional harm) and the victim’s harm (mild versus severe harm). In experiment 2, we aimed to manipulate intent in accidental harm scenarios exclusively, using positive or neutral intents and manipulating harm severity (mild versus severe harm). As expected, intent and harm severity moderated participants’ moral judgement of acceptability, punishment, and blame. Most importantly, in both experiments, the perpetrator’s intent not only interacted with the outcome severity but also polarised moral judgements in participants with a more deliberative reasoning style. While moral judgements of more intuitive reasoners were less sensitive to intent, more deliberative reasoners were more forgiving of accidental harm, especially following mild harm. These findings extend previous studies by showing that reasoning style interacts with intent and harm severity to shape moral judgement of accidents.

Prior knowledge has been shown to be an important factor in causal judgments. However, inconsistent patterns have been reported regarding the interaction between prior knowledge and the processing of contingency information. In three studies, we examined the effect of the plausibility of the putative cause on causal judgments, when prior expectations about the rate at which the cause is accompanied by the effect in question are explicitly controlled for. Results clearly show that plausibility has a clear effect that is independent of contingency information and type of task (passive or active). We also examined the role of strategy use as an individual difference in causal judgments. Specifically, the dual-strategy model suggests that people can either use a Statistical or a Counterexample strategy to process information. Across all three studies, results showed that Strategy use has a clear effect on causal judgments that is independent of both plausibility and contingency.

General conditionals, if p then q, can be used to make assertions about sets of objects. Previous studies have generally found that people judge the probability of one these conditionals to be the conditional probability of q given p, P( q|p). Two experiments investigated the qualitative relation between the exhaustive possibilities, p & q, p & ¬q, ¬p & q, and ¬p & ¬q, and truth and possibility judgements about general conditionals. In Experiment 1, for truth judgements, people evaluated a general conditional as “true” in sets containing p & q cases but no p & ¬q, and “true” judgements depended only on P( q|p). In Experiment 2, for possibility judgements, people’s responses implied that only p & q cases have to be possible in a set for a general conditional to be true of the set. Our results add to earlier findings against representing a general conditional as the material conditional of extensional logic, and they provide novel disconfirmation of two recent proposals: the modal semantics of revised mental model theory and certain inferentialist accounts of conditionals. They supply new support for suppositional theories of conditionals.

How is knowledge about word meaning represented in the mental lexicon? Current computational models infer word meanings from lexical co-occurrence patterns. They learn to represent words as vectors in a multidimensional space, wherein words that are used in more similar linguistic contexts-that is, are more semantically related-are located closer together. However, whereas inter-word proximity captures only overall relatedness, human judgements are highly context dependent. For example, dolphins and alligators are similar in size but differ in dangerousness. Here, we use a domain-general method to extract context-dependent relationships from word embeddings: 'semantic projection' of word-vectors onto lines that represent features such as size (the line connecting the words 'small' and 'big') or danger ('safe' to 'dangerous'), analogous to 'mental scales'. This method recovers human judgements across various object categories and properties. Thus, the geometry of word embeddings explicitly represents a wealth of context-dependent world knowledge.

We tend to mentally segment a series of events according to perceptual contextual changes, such that items from a shared context are more strongly associated in memory than items from different contexts. It is also known that timing context provides a scaffold to structure experiences in memory, but its role in event segmentation has not been investigated. We adapted a previous paradigm, which was used to investigate event segmentation using visual contexts, to study the effects of changes in timing contexts on event segmentation in associative memory. In two experiments, we presented lists of 36 items in which the interstimulus intervals (ISIs) changed after a series of six items ranging between 0.5 and 4 s in 0.5 s steps. After each list, participants judged which one of two test items were shown first (temporal order judgment) for items that were either drawn from the same context (within an ISI) or from consecutive contexts (across ISIs). Further, participants judged from memory whether the ISI associated to an item lasted longer than a standard interval (2.25 s) that was not previously shown (temporal source memory). Experiment 2 further included a time-item encoding task. Results revealed an effect of timing context changes in temporal order judgments, with faster responses (Experiment 1) or higher accuracy (Experiment 2) when items were drawn from the same context, as opposed to items drawn from across contexts. Further, in both experiments, we found that participants were well able to provide temporal source memory judgments based on recalled durations. Finally, replicated across experiments, we found subjective duration bias, as estimated by psychometric curve fitting parameters of the recalled durations, correlated negatively with within-context temporal order judgments. These findings show that changes in timing context support event segmentation in associative memory.

Decades of work has shown that learners rapidly extract structure from their environment, later leveraging their knowledge of what is more versus less consistent with prior experience to guide behavior. However, open questions remain about exactly what is remembered after exposure to structure. Memory for specific associations-transitions that unfold over time-is considered a prime candidate for guiding behavior. However, other factors could influence behavior, such as memory for general features like reliable groupings or within-group positions. We also do not yet know whether memory depends upon the amount of experience with the input structure, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of how statistical learning supports behavior. In 4 experiments, we tracked the emergence of memory for item-item transitions, order-independent groups, and positions by having 400 adults watch a stream of shape triplets followed by a recognition memory test. We manipulated how closely test sequences corresponded to the input along each dimension of interest, allowing us to isolate the contribution of each factor. Both item-item transitions and order-independent group information influenced behavior, highlighting statistical learning as a mechanism through which we form both specific and generalized representations. Moreover, these factors drove behavior after different amounts of experience: With limited exposure, only group information impacted old-new judgments specific transitions gained importance later. Our findings suggest statistical learning proceeds by first forming a general representation of structure, with memory being later refined to include specifics after more experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

There is recent evidence for a domain-general object recognition ability, called O, which is distinct from general intelligence and other cognitive and personality constructs. We extend the study of O by characterizing how it generalizes to the ability to recognize familiar objects and to the ability to make judgments of the average identity of ensembles of objects. We applied latent variable modeling to data collected from a sample of adults (N = 284) in three different tasks and for six different object domains (three novel and three familiar). The results replicated prior work in finding that on average 88% of the variance of lower-order factors could be accounted by O for novel objects. The latent constructs recruited by the higher-order factor for novel objects and for familiar objects were almost perfectly correlated and therefore functionally identical. A latent factor for ensemble perception shared about 42% of the variance with O, suggesting at least strong overlap between abilities supporting judgments about individual objects and ensemble of objects. This work extends the theoretical reach of O by showing generalization across two dimensions (familiar vs. novel objects; individual vs. ensemble object perception). With respect to the structure of individual differences in high-level vision, researchers would benefit from accounting for the contribution of O when seeking to understand various domain-specific abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences exist in the ability to create an accurate mental survey representation (i.e., a cognitive map) of a novel environment, yet the mechanisms underlying differences in cognitive map accuracy are still under investigation. To determine whether differences in overt attention allocation contribute to these individual differences, the current study examined whether looking times to landmarks and other objects while navigating in a dynamic virtual environment were related to cognitive map accuracy. Participants completed a battery of spatial tests; some tests assessed spatial skills prior to the navigation task (the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale and the Spatial Orientation Test), and others tested memory of the virtual environment Silcton after an exploration period (a landmark recognition task, a direction estimation task, a map-building task, and a route construction task). Individuals with inaccurate cognitive maps of Silcton, as measured by the direction estimation and map-building tasks, showed equivalent eye fixations to buildings and objects when exploring Silcton as those with accurate maps. Despite similar looking times, the inaccurate mappers were significantly worse at judgments of relative direction between landmarks in Silcton and showed poorer memory for landmarks in Silcton than accurate mappers. These findings suggest that cognitive mechanisms, such as mental perspective-taking, occurring after attention allocation underlie differences in cognitive map accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Research on forgiveness with children and adolescents is growing, yet little is known about the developmental mechanisms that underlie intergroup forgiveness in children and adolescents. In this study, youth (M = 9.39 years, SD = 1.67, N = 185, 107 female and 78 male; 54.6% European American, 20.5% African American, 8.1% Latinx, 5.9% Asian American, 3.8% multiracial, and 7.1% other) provided judgments and reasoning about forgiveness in hypothetical scenarios involving intergroup and intragroup transgressions. Participants with more sophisticated theoryof mind were more forgiving of transgressors and were more likely to differentiate their thinking about how sorry ingroup and outgroup transgressors will feel. Participants were more likely to forgive ingroup members and those that apologize than outgroup members and those who do not apologize. Results reveal that youth, especially those with more advanced theory of mind skills, have a sophisticated understanding of intergroup forgiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Sound symbolism is the phenomenon by which certain kinds of phonemes are associated with perceptual and/or semantic properties. In this article, we explored size sound symbolism (i.e., the mil/mal effect) in which high-front vowels (e.g., /i/) show an association with smallness, while low-back vowels (e.g., /ɑ/) show an association with largeness. This has previously been demonstrated with nonwords, but its impact on the processing of real language is unknown. We investigated this using a size judgement task, in which participants classified words for small or large objects, containing a small- or large-associated vowel, based on their size. Words were presented auditorily in Experiment 1 and visually in Experiment 2. We did not observe an effect of vowel congruence (i.e., between object size and the size association of its vowel) in either of the experiments. This suggests that there are limits to the impact of sound symbolism on the processing of real language.

If one friend confidently tells us to buy Product A while another friend thinks that Product B is better but is not confident, we may go with the advice of our confident friend. Should we? The relationship between people's confidence and accuracy has been of great interest in many fields, especially in high-stakes situations like eyewitness testimony. However, there is still little consensus about how much we should trust someone's overall confidence level. Here, we examine the across-subject relationship between average accuracy and average confidence in 213 unique datasets from the Confidence Database. This approach allows us to empirically address this issue with unprecedented statistical power and check for the presence of various moderators. We find an across-subject correlation between average accuracy and average confidence of R = .22. Importantly, this relationship is much stronger for memory than for perception tasks ("domain effect"), as well as for confidence scales with fewer points ("granularity effect"). These results show that we should take one's confidence seriously (and perhaps buy Product A) and suggest several factors that moderate the relative consistency of how people make confidence judgments.

Theories of affective influences on cognition posit that negative mood may increase cognitive load, causing a decrement in task performance (SeibertEllis, [1991]. Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance.

The strength of the learned relation between two events, a model for causal perception, has been found to depend on their overall statistical relation, and might be expected to be related to both training trial frequency and trial duration. We report five experiments using a rapid-trial streaming procedure containing Event 1-Event 2 pairings (A trials), Event 1-alone (B trials), Event 2-alone (C trials), and neither event (D trials), in which trial frequencies and durations were independently varied. Judgements of association increased with increasing frequencies of A trials and decreased with increasing frequencies of both B and C trials but showed little effect of frequency of D trials. Across five experiments, a weak but often significant effect of trial duration was also detected, which was always in the same direction as trial frequency. Thus, both frequency and duration of trials influenced learning, but frequency had decidedly stronger effects. Importantly, the benefit of more trials greatly outweighed the observed reduction in effect size caused by a proportional decrease in trial duration. In experiment 5, more trials of proportionately shorter duration enhanced effects on contingency judgments despite a shortening of the training session. We consider the observed 'frequency advantage' with respect to both frequentist models of learning and models based on information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

People can support abstract reasoning by using mental models with spatial simulations. Such models are employed when people represent elements in terms of ordered dimensions (e.g. who is oldest, Tom, Dick, or Harry). We test and find that the process of forming and using such mental models can influence the liking of its elements (e.g. Tom, Dick, or Harry). The presumed internal structure of such models (linear-transitive array of elements), generates variations in processing ease (fluency) when using the model in working memory (see the Symbolic Distance Effect, SDE). Specifically, processing of pairs where elements have larger distances along the order should be easier compared to pairs with smaller distances. Elements from easier pairs should be liked more than elements from difficult pairs (fluency being hedonically positive). Experiment 1 shows that unfamiliar ideographs are liked more when at wider distances and therefore easier to process. Experiment 2 replicates this effect with non-words. Experiment 3 rules out a non-spatial explanation of the effect while Experiments 4 offers a high-powered replication. Experiment 5 shows that the spatial effect spontaneously emerges after learning, even without a task that explicitly focuses on fluency. Experiment 6 employed a shorter array, but yielded no significant results.

Improving the accuracy of medical image interpretation can improve the diagnosis of numerous diseases. We compared different approaches to aggregating repeated decisions about medical images to improve the accuracy of a single decision maker. We tested our algorithms on data from both novices (undergraduates) and experts (medical professionals). Participants viewed images of white blood cells and made decisions about whether the cells were cancerous or not. Each image was shown twice to the participants and their corresponding confidence judgments were collected. The maximum confidence slating (MCS) algorithm leverages metacognitive abilities to consider the more confident response in the pair of responses as the more accurate "final response" (Koriat, 2012), and it has previously been shown to improve accuracy on our task for both novices and experts (Hasan et al., 2021). We compared MCS to similarity-based aggregation (SBA) algorithms where the responses made by the same participant on similar images are pooled together to generate the "final response." We determined similarity by using two different neural networks where one of the networks had been trained on white blood cells and the other had not. We show that SBA improves performance for novices even when the neural network had no specific training on white blood cell images. Using an informative representation (i.e., network trained on white blood cells) allowed one to aggregate over more neighbors and further boosted the performance of novices. However, SBA failed to improve the performance for experts even with the informative representation. This difference in efficacy of the SBA suggests different decision mechanisms for novices and experts.

Metacognition plays a role in environment learning (EL). When navigating, we monitor environment information to judge our likelihood to remember our way, and we engage in control by using tools to prevent getting lost. Yet, the relationship between metacognition and EL is understudied. In this paper, we examine the possibility of leveraging metacognition to support EL. However, traditional metacognitive theories and methodologies were not developed with EL in mind. Here, we use traditional metacognitive theories and approaches as a foundation for a new examination of metacognition in EL. We highlight three critical considerations about EL. Namely: (1) EL is a complex process that unfolds sequentially and is thereby enriched with multiple different types of cues, (2) EL is inherently driven by a series of ecologically relevant motivations and constraints, and (3) monitoring and control interact to support EL. In doing so, we describe how task demands and learning motivations inherent to EL should shape how metacognition is explored. With these considerations, we provide three methodological recommendations for investigating metacognition during EL. Specifically, researchers should: (1) instantiate EL goals to impact learning, metacognition, and retrieval processes, (2) prompt learners to make frequent metacognitive judgments and consider metacognitive accuracy as a primary performance metric, and (3) incorporate insights from both transfer appropriate processing and monitoring hypotheses when designing EL assessments. In summary, to effectively investigate how metacognition impacts EL, both ecological and methodological considerations need to be weighed.

The temporal predictability of upcoming events plays a crucial role in the adjustment of anticipatory cognitive control in multitasking. Previous research has demonstrated that task switching performance improved if tasks were validly predictable by a pre-target interval. Hence, far, the underlying cognitive processes of time-based task expectancy in task switching have not been clearly defined. The present study investigated whether the effect of time-based expectancy is due to expectancy of post-perceptual task components or rather due to facilitation of perceptual visual processing of the coloured task indicator. Participants performed two numeric judgment tasks (parity vs. magnitude), which were each indicated by two different colours. Each task was either more or less frequently preceded by one of two intervals (500 ms or 1500 ms). Tasks were indicated either by colours that were each more frequently (or in Exp. 1 also less frequently) paired with the interval or by colours that were equally frequent for each interval. Participants only responded faster when colour and task were predictable by time (expected colour), not when the task alone was predictable (neutral colour). Hence, our results speak in favour of perceptual time-based task indicator expectancy being the underlying cognitive mechanism of time-based expectancy in the task switching paradigm.

We can make exquisitely precise movements without the apparent need for conscious monitoring. But can we monitor the low-level movement parameters when prompted? And what are the mechanisms that allow us to monitor our movements? To answer these questions, we designed a semi-virtual ball throwing task. On each trial, participants first threw a virtual ball by moving their arm (with or without visual feedback, or replayed from a previous trial) and then made a two-alternative forced choice on the resulting ball trajectory. They then rated their confidence in their decision. We measured metacognitive efficiency using meta-d’/d’ and compared it between different informational domains of the first-order task (motor, visuomotor or visual information alone), as well as between two different versions of the task based on different parameters of the movement: proximal (position of the arm) or distal (resulting trajectory of the ball thrown).We found that participants were able to monitor their performance based on distal motor information as well as when proximal information was available. Their metacognitive efficiency was also equally high in conditions with different sources of information available. The analysis of correlations across participants revealed an unexpected result: while metacognitive efficiency correlated between informational domains (which would indicate domain-generality of metacognition), it did not correlate across the different parameters of movement. We discuss possible sources of this discrepancy and argue that specific first-order task demands may play a crucial role in our metacognitive ability and should be considered when making inferences about domain-generality based on correlations.

In three experiments, we presented children and adults with opportunities to condemn acts resembling bribery, a prevalent form of power abuse. Adults and children (N = 333) in the United States rated the acceptability of actions by contest judges. Judges used their position in a self-serving (e.g., accepted or requested gifts from contestants prior to picking winners) versus responsible (e.g., rejected gifts, accepted gifts after judging) way. Across experiments, children by age 10 gave harsher ratings to judges who accepted or requested gifts prior to selecting the contest winners. Further, children expected judges to become biased (Experiment 1) and secretive (Experiment 2) if they accepted gifts during the contest. Children's judgments were influenced by characters' authority level (Experiment 3) and varied as a function of age and modality of assessment (e.g., whether gifts were accepted vs. rejected). Taken together, these results constitute evidence that by late childhood people showcase an emerging moral stance against unethical actions linked to authority-based corruption. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

People routinely wear face masks during the pandemic, but little is known about their impact on body perception. In this online study, we presented female body images of Caucasian avatars in common dress sizes displaying happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions with and without face masks, and asked women to rate the perceived body attractiveness and body size. In comparison with mask-off condition, mask-on decreased body attractiveness ratings for happy avatars but did not affect ratings for neutral avatars irrespective of avatar dress sizes. For avatars displaying angry expressions, mask-on increased body attractiveness ratings for slimmer avatars but did not affect ratings for larger avatars. On the other hand, body size estimation was not systematically affected by face masks and facial expressions. It appears that face masks mainly show an expression-dependent influence on body attractiveness judgement, possibly through suppressing the perceived facial expressions.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Previous literature on the SNARC effect examined which factors modulate spatial-numerical associations. Recently, the role of order in the SNARC effect has been debated and further research is necessary to better understand its contribution. The present study investigated how the order elicited by the context of the stimuli and by task demands interact. Across three experiments, we presented numbers in the context of a mobile phone keypad, an overlearned numerical display in which the ordinal position of numbers differs from the mental number line. The experiments employed three tasks with different levels of consistency with the order elicited by the context. In Experiment 1, participants judged numbers based on their spatial position on the keypad, and we found a spatial association consistent with the keypad configuration, indicating that the spatial association is driven both by the context and by the task when they consistently elicit the same order. In Experiment 2a, participants performed a magnitude classification task and results revealed a lack of spatial associations, suggesting a conflict between the orders elicited by the context and by the task. In Experiment 2b, participants performed a parity judgement task and the results revealed a SNARC effect, suggesting that the order elicited by the context did not modulate the spatial association. Overall, three different tasks gave rise to three different results. This shows that the context alone is not sufficient in modulating spatial-numerical associations, but that the consistency between the orders elicited by context and task demands is a key factor.

People can make trustworthiness judgements based on facial characteristics. However, the previous findings regarding whether facial age influences interpersonal trust are inconsistent. Using the trust game, the current study investigated the interactions of facial age with attractiveness and emotional expression in regard to trustworthiness judgements. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger participants were asked to invest in either younger or older faces that were shown for 2,000 and 33 ms, respectively. The results showed that people trust the faces of older people more than they do younger people. There was also an interaction between facial age and attractiveness. Participants invested more money in older faces than in younger faces only when they perceived the faces to be less attractive. However, the interaction between facial age and emotional expression was slightly inconsistent in the two experiments. Participants invested more money in older faces that were shown for 2,000 ms when they perceived the happy and sad emotions, but they invested more money in older faces that were shown for 33 ms when they perceived the happy emotion. These results reveal that people make trustworthiness judgements based on multiple facial cues when they view strangers of different ages.

I applied the methodology known as maximum likelihood conjoint measurement (MLCM) to diagnose how numerical magnitude affects the perception of physical size of numerals in the size congruity effect (SCE). Traditional theories of the SCE argue for automatic activation of numerical magnitude, and therefore the obligatory interaction in perception between number and size. Participants in the current study were presented with pairs of numerals varying on physical size and numerical magnitude. They judged which member of the pair was physically larger, while ignoring numerical magnitude. Three nested observer models (i.e. independent, additive, and saturated) of the contribution of physical size and numerical magnitude to perceived size were fit to the data using maximum likelihood. The independent observer model exhibited the best fit for the majority of observers. These results cast doubts on the view that numerical magnitude is activated automatically in judgments of physical size of numerals.

There is a notion that mathematical equations can be considered aesthetic objects. However, whereas some aesthetic experiences are triggered primarily by the sensory properties of objects, for mathematical equations aesthetic judgments extend beyond their sensory qualities and are also informed by semantics and knowledge. Therefore, to the extent that expertise in mathematics represents the accumulation of domain knowledge, it should influence aesthetic judgments of equations. In a between-groups study design involving university students who majored in mathematics (i.e., experts) or not (i.e., laypeople), we found support for the hypothesis that mathematics majors exhibit more agreement in their aesthetic judgments of equations—reflecting a greater degree of shared variance driven by formal training in the domain. Furthermore, their judgments were driven more strongly by familiarity and meaning than was the case for laypeople. These results suggest that expertise via advanced training in mathematics alters (and sharpens) aesthetic judgments of mathematical equations.

Human faces and voices are rich sources of information that can vary in many different ways. Most of the literature on face/voice perception has focused on understanding how people look and sound different to each other (between-person variability). However, recent studies highlight the ways in which the same person can look and sound different on different occasions (within-person variability). Across three experiments, we examined how within- and between-person variability relate to one another for social trait impressions by collecting trait ratings attributed to multiple face images and voice recordings of the same people. We find that within-person variability in social trait evaluations is at least as great as between-person variability. Using different stimulus sets across experiments, trait impressions of voices are consistently more variable within people than between people-a pattern that is only evident occasionally when judging faces. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding within-person variability, showing how judgments of the same person can vary widely on different encounters and quantify how this pattern differs for voice and face perception. The work consequently has implications for theoretical models proposing that voices can be considered "auditory faces" and imposes limitations to the "kernel of truth" hypothesis of trait evaluations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).