Search

Over the past 50 years, consumer researchers have presented extensive evidence that consumer preference can be swayed by the decision context, particularly the configuration of the choice set. Importantly, behavioral research on context effects has inspired prominent quantitative research on multialternative decision-making published in leading psychology, management, economics, and general interest journals. While both streams of research seem to agree that context effects are an important research area, there has been relatively limited interaction, communication, and collaboration between the two research camps. In this article, we seek to initiate an active dialogue between the two sides. We begin by providing a critical overview of the two literatures on context effects, discussing both their strengths and weaknesses, as well as disparities and complementarities. Here, we place particular emphasis on deepening consumer researchers' understanding of context effects by drawing on prominent quantitative research published in non-marketing journals over the last decades. Importantly, we provide a roadmap for the future that can inspire further research and potential collaborations between the two camps, overcoming silos in knowledge creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real-world marketplaces, one may encounter an alternative that is inferior to another one in the assortment. While the presence of such seemingly irrelevant inferior alternatives should ostensibly have no influence on consumers' decisions, an extensive literature using stylized lab experiments has found that, surprisingly, their presence matters. Specifically, the dominance effect suggests that the presence of an inferior alternative shifts consumer's preferences toward the alternative made to be superior. However, null results in some recent lab studies and a lack of real-world evidence call into question whether, when, and how the effect exists. In this work, we find clear evidence that dominance matters in the wild. We also identify an important moderator for the dominance effect—preference uncertainty—and test it in both a real-world marketplace for digital freelance services and a lab experiment. Further, we find evidence for additional moderators that help explain how the effect works, including the count of dominated alternatives and the magnitude of dominance, consistent with a perceptual mechanism. This work is the first to use consequential field data to shed light on when and why the dominance effects occur, with implications for marketers, choice architects, user interface designers, and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding the nature and role of the mental representations involved in solving arithmetic word problems. In this study, we took a closer look at the interplay between mental representations, drawing production, and strategy choice. We used dual-strategy isomorphic word problems sharing the same mathematical structure, but differing in the entities they mentioned in their problem statement. Due to the non-mathematical knowledge attached to these entities, some problems were believed to lead to a specific (cardinal) encoding compatible with one solving strategy, whereas other problems were thought to foster a different (ordinal) encoding compatible with the other solving strategy. We asked 59 children and 52 adults to solve 12 of those arithmetic word problems and to make a diagram of each problem. We hypothesized that the diagrams of both groups would display prototypical features indicating either a cardinal representation or an ordinal representation, depending on the entities mentioned in the problem statement. Joint analysis of the drawing task and the problem-solving task showed that the cardinal and ordinal features of the diagrams are linked with the hypothesized semantic properties of the problems and, crucially, with the choice of one solving strategy over another. We showed that regardless of their experience, participants' strategy use depends on their problem representation, which is influenced by the non-mathematical information in the problem statement, as revealed in their diagrams. We discuss the relevance of drawing tasks for investigating mental representations and fostering mathematical development in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation to the environment is a universal property of perception across all sensory modalities. It can enhance the salience of new events in an ongoing background and helps maintain perceptual constancy in the face of variable sensory input. Several contrastive adaptation effects have been identified using sounds within the categories of human voice and musical instruments. The present study investigated whether such contrast effects can occur between voice and nonvoice stimulus categories. A 10-step continuum between "voice" (/a/, /o/, or /u/ vowels) and "instrument" (bassoon, horn, or viola) sounds was generated for each of the nine possible pairs. In each trial, an adaptor, either a voice or instrument, was played four times and was followed by a target from along the appropriate continuum. When trials with voice and instrumental adaptors were grouped into separate blocks, strong contrastive adaptation effects were observed, with the target more likely to be identified as a voice following instrumental adaptors and vice versa (Experiment 1). The effects were not observed for visual image adaptors (Experiment 2). The effects were somewhat larger when the adaptors and the target were presented to the same than to different ears, but significant adaptation was observed in both conditions, suggesting contributions of central mechanisms, following binaural integration (Experiment 3). The effect accumulated when the same type of adaptor was presented consecutively and persisted following the end of the adaptors (Experiment 4). The discovery of voice-nonvoice contrastive pairs opens the possibility of studying perceptual or neuronal voice selectivity while keeping acoustic features constant. Public Significance Statement: Our study suggests that the perceptual boundary between voice and nonvoice is dependent on the preceding auditory context in a contrastive way. These context effects can build up when similar contexts are presented consecutively and can persist across time even when the context is no longer present. The results highlight the possibility of manipulating the perceptual identity of a sound as voice or nonvoice while keeping the acoustic signal the same, therefore addressing a common challenge in previous voice perception research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School context can shape relative intervention response in myriad ways due to factors, such as instructional quality, resource allocation, peer effects, and correlations between the school context and characteristics of enrolled students (e.g., higher-poverty students attending higher-poverty schools). In the current study, we used data from 16,000 U.S. Grade 3 students in a community-based supplemental reading intervention program to investigate the degree to which school context factors (percentage eligible for free/reduced-price lunch [FRPL], school-level achievement) relate to the differences in triannual reading fluency growth rates between students actively receiving supplemental intervention (active recipients) and those that formerly received intervention (and therefore only received general class instruction at this time; former recipients). Using Bayesian multilevel modeling, our findings indicate that school-level FRPL eligibility played a more prominent factor in growth rate differences between these two groups than school-level reading achievement. However, school-level reading achievement was much more strongly related to reading fluency differences between active and former intervention recipients at the beginning of the school year (when controlling for FRPL). Implications for investigating school-level heterogeneity in intervention response and sustainability are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether behaviors of targets presented on other trials could influence representational momentum of a current target was examined. In Experiment 1, each participant received a stimulus set in which (a) 80% of trials presented a moving target and 20% of trials presented a stationary target or (b) 20% of trials presented a moving target and 80% of trials presented a stationary target. In Experiment 2, each participant received a stimulus set in which (a) 80% of trials presented rightward motion and 20% of trials presented leftward motion, (b) 50% of trials presented rightward motion and 50% of trials presented leftward motion, or (c) 20% of trials presented rightward motion and 80% of trials presented leftward motion. Representational momentum of a moving target was not influenced by whether the majority of other trials in the stimulus set presented a stationary target, motion in the same direction, or motion in the opposite direction. The results suggest that behavior of targets on other trials was not effective in creating expectations that influenced representational momentum of the current target. Implications for theories of representational momentum are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purchase decisions typically involve tradeoffs between attributes associated with desirability (e.g. quality) and feasibility (e.g. price). In this article, we examine how the decision context impacts consumers' preference between a high-desirability (HD) option and a high-feasibility (HF) alternative. Nineteen studies demonstrate a novel context effect, the "upscaling effect," whereby introducing a symmetrically dominated decoy option to a set (i.e. an option that is inferior compared to all alternatives in the set) leads to an increase in the choice share of the HD option. To account for the upscaling effect, we advance a two-stage model of consumer decision-making for decisions that involve tradeoffs between desirability and feasibility. According to our model, when the decision context provides a reason for choosing either option, such as when a decoy option is added to the set, consumers prioritize reasons that support choice of HD options over HF alternatives. Our model can explain the upscaling effect, as well as other findings reported in the literature, such as asymmetric attraction effects (Heath and Chatterjee 1995) and asymmetric sales promotion effects (Blattberg and Wisniewski 1989). Furthermore, the upscaling effect holds important managerial implications because it provides an effective way to increase sales of high-end products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green attribute trade‐offs have been identified as one of the significant antecedents of the green gap phenomenon (i.e., the discrepancy between pro‐green attitudes and purchase behavior of green products) in literature. This paper focuses on the strategic role of trade‐off‐related context effects (i.e., compromise effect and asymmetric dominance effect) as behavioral nudges in green marketing. We suggest that the benefit association of green attributes can influence the scope of these two context effects. We use three studies with experimental design to illustrate the said effect across three trade‐off scenarios, a range of product categories, and a diverse set of samples. Study 1 (307 participants), Study 2 (312 participants), and Study 3 (259 participants) investigated the hypotheses for trade‐offs between green attributes and other conventional product attributes, particularly price, functional performance, and usage/procurement convenience, respectively. The results reveal that when green attributes are associated with user‐benefit, the target green option performs better as a compromise option than as an asymmetrically dominant option, whereas when the green attributes are associated with environmental‐benefit, the target green option performs better as an asymmetrically dominant option than as a compromise option. Further, this difference in efficacy under environmental‐benefit association is less pronounced for individuals high on interdependent self‐construal. Additionally, we find that under the environmental‐benefit association, an independent self‐construal attenuates the efficacy of the compromise effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Item position effect (IPE) refers to situations where an item performs differently when it is administered in different positions on a test. The majority of previous research studies have focused on investigating IPE under linear testing. There is a lack of IPE research under adaptive testing. In addition, the existence of IPE might violate Item Response Theory (IRT)’s item parameter invariance assumption, which facilitates applications of IRT in various psychometric tasks such as computerized adaptive testing (CAT). Ignoring IPE might lead to issues such as inaccurate ability estimation in CAT. This article extends research on IPE by proposing and evaluating approaches to controlling position effects under an item‐level computerized adaptive test via a simulation study. The results show that adjusting IPE via a pretesting design (approach 3) or a pool design (approach 4) results in better ability estimation accuracy compared to no adjustment (baseline approach) and item‐level adjustment (approach 2). Practical implications of each approach as well as future research directions are discussed as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist radical right (PRR) parties are often more successful in some regions of their countries than in others. However, previous research shows that the relationship between context and PRR support is not straightforward. We develop and test an expanded framework linking local conditions to PRR support through two causal mechanisms. First, we argue economic and cultural contextual factors can influence citizens by fostering a sense of perceived local decline, which in turn predicts both populist and nativist attitudes and, hence, PRR support (mediation). Second, we expect that citizens with fewer resources and stronger local embeddedness are more strongly influenced by the context in which they live (moderation). Combining geocoded survey data with contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, GB and NL), we show that the link between local context and PRR support is indeed mediated and moderated, providing a better understanding of the spatial distribution behind recent PRR success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current public debates about rising violence against police officers, and conversely, criticism of racial profiling by the police force, contradict the high levels of trust in the German police reported by public surveys. This raises the question of why the tension between the police and citizens arises. German Criminology has not yet exploited the potential of procedural justice theory to explain the shifting dynamics of trust. Empirical studies on how evaluations of police fairness and effectiveness influence police legitimacy in Germany have long been overdue. Additionally, there is minimal evidence of whether police fairness is experienced differently in different social contexts. Therefore, this study answers two pertinent research questions: (1) To what extent does trust in German police and police legitimacy depend on procedural fairness? (2) To what extent do residents in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods have lower levels of trust in police fairness? Consistent with international research on procedural justice theory, the results reveal significant effects of normative predictors of trust in the police, such as perceived fairness and neighbourhood trust. Using advanced multilevel modelling, this study observes the effects of two contextual variables (welfare recipients and official crime rates) on neighbourhood levels of trust in police fairness. The results reveal that the impact of personal assessments of the neighbourhood, personal disadvantages, and experiences with the police exceeds neighbourhood context effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the past few years has investigated the semantic complexity of expressions with aspectual verbs followed by entity-denoting complements such as finish the book that led to processing costs cross-linguistically. The Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH) proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized to occur at the verb's complement, where a specific dimension is selected based on context (Piñango & Deo, 2016). In light of the critical role of the context in SIH, recent research (Lai et al. 2023; Lai & Piñango, 2019) has investigated how the interpretations of sentences with aspectual verbs were affected by biased contexts in an offline sentence acceptability judgment study and an online eye-tracking study. However, results of the two studies showed that biased contexts disambiguated the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions offline while processing costs in biased contexts were not found to attenuate costs in real time. The reason why conflicting results were found offline versus online and the timecourse of context effects remain unclear, but in our view it may be due to pragmatic contexts, i.e. descriptions of the utterance context used to infer the salient reading of the utterance. We used grammatical contexts – two classes of adverbs – in a self-paced reading study to examine context effects for sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. We found that biased grammatical contexts not only affected the interpretations in the offline task, but crucially facilitated processing in the online experiment as well. We conclude that biased grammatical contexts predetermine the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions immediately in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological state alterations induced by substance-related physiological mechanisms affect consumer decision-making. We examine the influence of caffeine—the world's most popular psychostimulant—on the attraction effect. In three double-blinded experiments, we show that caffeine intake via coffee influences consumers' preference for product options that asymmetrically dominate a decoy option in choice sets (i.e., the attraction effect). Using real products in consequential choice tasks, we show that high caffeine intake (200 mg) is associated with a larger attraction effect both on between-subjects and within-subjects levels and in free-choice as well as forced-choice decision tasks. On the contrary, we do not find support for caffeine's influence on the attraction effect when considering intermediate levels of caffeine intake (125 mg) and hypothetical decisions. We discuss theoretical implications for context effect research and practical implications for marketers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context effects occur when the preference between two alternatives is affected by the presence of an extra alternative. These effects are some of the most well studied phenomena in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision making. Recent research in this area has revealed an intriguing pattern of results. On the one hand, these effects are robust and ubiquitous. That is, they have been demonstrated in many domains and different choice settings. On the other hand, they are fragile and they disappear or even reverse under different conditions. This pattern of results has spurred debate and speculation about the cognitive mechanisms that drive these choices. The attraction effect, where the preference for an option increases in the presence of a dominated decoy, has generated the most controversy. In this registered report, we systematically vary factors that are known to be associated with the attraction effect to build a solid foundation of empirical results to aid future theory development. We find a robust attraction effect across the different conditions. The strength of this effect is modulated by the display order (e.g., decoy top, target middle, competitor bottom) and mode (numeric vs. graphical) but not display layout (by-attribute vs. by-alternative).

Does economic inequality dampen support for the political system? This question has been answered in the affirmative in prior work studying the relationship between economic inequality and various manifestations of political system support across countries or US states. However, recent work challenges the premise underlying such analyses by showing that citizens are generally ignorant about national‐level inequality. Relatedly, work on contextual effects finds that economic and social phenomena are particularly consequential for political attitudes when they reflect palpable everyday experiences. Combining these insights, we suggest that a more theoretically and methodologically appropriate test of the proposition that economic inequality reduces political system support should focus on local, neighbourhood‐level economic inequality, which citizens encounter on a daily basis. By linking multiple geo‐referenced surveys – both cross‐sectional and longitudinal – with Danish registry data, we create micro‐contextual measures of local economic inequality and relate them to a range of indicators of political system support. We find no evidence indicating that local inequality reduces political system support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the effects of sentence context and tonal information on spoken word recognition processes in Cantonese Chinese. We recruited 60 native Cantonese listeners to participate in the eye-tracking experiment. The target words (phonologically similar words) were manipulated to either (1) a congruent context or (2) an incongruent context in the experiment. The resulting eye-movement patterns in the incongruent context condition clearly revealed that (1) sentence context produced a garden-path effect in the initial stage of the spoken word recognition processes and then (2) the lexical tone of the word (bottom-up information) overrode the contextual effects to help listeners to discriminate between different similar-sounding words during lexical access. In conclusion, the patterns of eye-tracking data show the interactive processes between the lexical tone (an acoustic cue within a Cantonese word) and sentence context played in different phases to the spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: We examined how context is used to facilitate reading in the second language (L2) compared with the first language (L1), and how L2 availability and age modulate these context effects. Methodology: Using self-paced reading, participants read high- and low-constraint Hebrew sentences. In Experiment 1, L1 (n = 45) and L2 (n = 48) Hebrew readers were compared, whereas in Experiment 2, only L2 readers (n = 131) were examined, testing modulations by L2 availability and age. Data and analysis: Reading times of target, post target, and sentence final words were analyzed using linear-mixed-effects models. Findings: In Experiment 1, L2 readers differed from L1 readers in contextual processing, as evident in the significant interaction between context type and language background on the final word measure. In Experiment 2, L2 readers with lower L2 availability scores differed from those with higher scores, and younger readers differed from older ones, in the way high- and low-constraining context affected their reading behavior in the target word and in the final word of the sentence. These differences were indicated by significant interactions between context type and L2 availability as well as between context type and age group. These findings are best understood under a compensatory processing account. Originality: By complementing L1–L2 group comparisons with in-depth examination of the L2 profile, the current study reveals a continuous effect of L2 availability, such that a lower L2 availability is associated with a greater reliance on context. Furthermore, the inclusion of older and younger adults provides converging evidence to the use of contextual support as a compensatory mechanism when lexical processing is more effortful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the nature and robustness of the attraction effect. The attraction effect can be seen as a persistent bias or as the result of heuristics that may not persist upon reflection. We provide robust experimental evidence that the attraction effect first rises and then falls over time when participants are incentivized to make a quick choice they can later revise. Participants in two experiments under continuous time pressure make choices among options with the aim to maximize an objective, measurable value. We find that participants disproportionately favor the asymmetrically dominant option in the first seconds and then revise their choices until the effect disappears or is significantly reduced. The effect survives only in the special and often studied case of indifference among options. We develop a tractable extension to the multiattribute linear ballistic accumulator model to allow for choice revisions. That model explains how choice revisions reduce context effects. We estimate its parameters at the individual level and document differences between fast and slow participants that also play a role in explaining the rise-and-fall pattern in the attraction effect. We extend the analysis to similarity and compromise effects. We find a very small similarity effect, which does not exhibit any dynamics, and a significant reverse compromise effect displaying a rise-and-fall pattern. Our findings, although limited to objective-value tasks, are consistent with context effects being short-term heuristics that can be superseded by more reflective cognitive strategies when decision makers have time and incentive to do so. This paper was accepted by Manel Baucells, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique [Grant SAE2 Jeune Chercheur 2017]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4874. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When individual discourses and attitudes on social media are used for electoral geography with their spatio-temporal information, they can provide essential clues about voter behavior and voting preferences. Although there are different election-based studies using data from social media, these studies have remained far from spatial understanding of the reasons behind the votes. This research aims to understand the differences in voter behavior and voting, along with revealing the context effects on voting by using this new data and methods in the field of electoral geography. We obtain the election-oriented tweets on X (Twitter) posted from Yenimahalle (Turkey), determine sentiment states, identify the dominant topics in the tweets, and reveal the relationship between the popularity rates of the candidates on X (Twitter) and the actual vote rates. Consequently, user-generated spatio-temporal data on X (Twitter) is essential in understanding the differences in voter behavior/participation and voting, as well as in revealing context effects on voting.

Understanding exit choice behaviour is essential for optimising safety management strategies in building evacuations. Previous research focused on contextual attributes, such as spatial information, influencing exit choice, often using utility models based on monotonic functions of attributes. However, during emergencies, evacuees typically make rapid, less calculated decisions. The choice of context can significantly impact the evaluation of attributes, leading to preference reversals within the same choice set but under varying context conditions. This cognitive psychological phenomenon, known as context effects, encompasses the compromise effect, the similarity effect, and the attraction effect. While researchers have long recognised the pivotal role of context effects in human decision making, their incorporation into computer-aided evacuation management remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce context effects (CE) in a social force (SF) model, CE-SF. Evaluating CE-SF's performance against the UF-SF model, which considers only the utility function (UF), we find that CE-SF better replicates exit choice behaviour across urgency levels, highlighting its potential to enhance evacuation strategies. Notably, our study identifies three distinct context effects during evacuations, emphasising their importance in advancing safety measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musicians display a variety of auditory perceptual benefits relative to people with little or no musical training; these benefits are collectively referred to as the "musician advantage." Importantly, musicians consistently outperform nonmusicians for tasks relating to pitch, but there are mixed reports as to musicians outperforming nonmusicians for timbre-related tasks. Due to their experience manipulating the timbre of their instrument or voice in performance, we hypothesized that musicians would be more sensitive to acoustic context effects stemming from the spectral changes in timbre across a musical context passage (played by a string quintet then filtered) and a target instrument sound (French horn or tenor saxophone; Experiment 1). Additionally, we investigated the role of a musician's primary instrument of instruction by recruiting French horn and tenor saxophone players to also complete this task (Experiment 2). Consistent with the musician advantage literature, musicians exhibited superior pitch discrimination to nonmusicians. Contrary to our main hypothesis, there was no difference between musicians and nonmusicians in how spectral context effects shaped instrument sound categorization. Thus, musicians may only outperform nonmusicians for some auditory skills relevant to music (e.g., pitch perception) but not others (e.g., timbre perception via spectral differences). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Turkish Journal of Geographical Sciences / Coğrafi Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Cografi Bilimler Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite marketers' efforts to make consumers feel attractive in many sales and advertising contexts, little is known about how consumers' self-perceived physical attractiveness influences their decision making. The authors examine whether a boost in consumers' self-perceived attractiveness influences subsequent choices in domains unrelated to beauty. Across six studies, the authors find converging evidence that a boost in consumers' self-perceived attractiveness enhances their general self-confidence and reduces preference uncertainty, resulting in less reliance on the choice context and thus fewer choices of compromise, all-average, and default options. The findings further show that consumers use self-confidence as metacognitive information for inferring preference uncertainty in subsequent decisions. This process is a misattribution that can be attenuated when consumers attribute their self-confidence to the self-perceived attractiveness. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals' decisions under risk tend to be in line with the notion that "losses loom larger than gains." This loss aversion in decision making is commonly understood as a stable individual preference that is manifested across different contexts. The presumed stability and generality, which underlies the prominence of loss aversion in the literature at large, has been recently questioned by studies reporting how loss aversion can disappear, and even reverse, as a function of the choice context. The present study investigated whether loss aversion reflects a trait-like attitude of avoiding losses or rather individuals' adaptability to different contexts. We report three experiments investigating the within-subject context sensitivity of loss aversion in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Our results show that the choice context can shift people's loss aversion, though somewhat inconsistently. Moreover, individual estimates of loss aversion are shown to have a considerable degree of stability. Altogether, these results indicate that even though the absolute value of loss aversion can be affected by external factors such as the choice context, estimates of people's loss aversion still capture the relative dispositions toward gains and losses across individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in intergroup threat theory, much research has illustrated the negative impact of the contextual presence of ethnic minorities construed as threats by the mainstream society on racial attitudes. This study examines the possibility that the presence of other "non-threatening" ethnic minorities could undermine such negative impact. We contend that the presence of genuine diversity can promote multicultural experiences and reduce people's tendency to single out specific ethnic groups as threatening. Analysis of telephone survey (N = 2407) and government by-census data in Hong Kong shows that proportion of district residents being South Asians and proportion of district residents using Mandarin as their usual spoken language were associated with lower levels of social and political tolerance when proportion of district residents being other ethnic minorities was low. The negative impact became weaker when proportion of other ethnic minorities increased. The pattern of results was more conspicuous among less educated citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence and theoretical models suggest that phonetic category perception involves two stages of auditory and phonetic processing. However, few studies examined the time course of these two processing stages. With brief stop consonant segments as context stimuli, this study examined the temporal dynamics of stop consonant perception by varying the inter-stimulus interval between context and target stimuli. The results suggest that phonetic category activation of stop consonants may appear before 100 ms of processing time. Furthermore, the activation of phonetic categories resulted in contrast context effects on identifying the target stop continuum; the auditory processing of stop consonants resulted in a different context effect from those caused by phonetic category activation. The findings provide further evidence for the two-stage model of speech perception and reveal the time course of auditory and phonetic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of magnitude, crucial for a mental representation of the physical world, is often subject to significant biases. Many of these biases are similar across sensory modalities, implying a generalized perception of magnitude. At the same time, some physical magnitudes might have a dedicated modality-specific calibration mechanism to enhance perceptual sensitivity. We examined this question of generalized versus modality-specific processes testing between- and within-modalities' contextual effects on the perception of magnitude. In a constant stimuli procedure, a central standard was embedded in shorter and longer contextual standards. These contextual standards were sampled in either a relatively wider or narrower range of durations. Participants were asked to determine which of the two consecutive durations was longer. Better perceptual sensitivity was found for narrower contexts, with stronger effects in trials in which the standard was presented first. Interestingly, narrower context enhanced sensitivity for standards within the same modality but had no effect on standards of another modality. A unidirectional transfer of contextual effects was observed under certain conditions from auditory, the dominant modality in performing temporal judgments, to vision. These results suggest that the perceptual system appears to develop modality-specific calibration mechanisms, most likely, to enhance perceptual sensitivity and maintain sensory specialization. Public Significance Statement: This study shows that both the visual and the auditory modalities use contextual information to calibrate sensitivity of duration perception; however, duration perception is only calibrated by modality-specific context, presumably to maintain sensory specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Previous experiments purportedly showed that image-based factors like convexity were su cient for figure assignment. Recently, however, we found that the probability of perceiving a figure on the convex side of a central border was only slightly higher than chance for two-region displays and increased with the number of display regions; this increase was observed only when the concave regions were homogeneously colored. These convex figure context e ects (CEs) revealed that figure assignment in these classic displays entails more than a response to local convexity. A Bayesian observer replicated the convex figure CEs using both a convexity object prior and a new, homogeneous background prior and made the novel prediction that the classic displays in which both the convex and concave regions were homogeneous were ambiguous during perceptual organization. Methods: Here,we report three experiments investigating the proposed ambiguity and examining how the convex figure CEs unfold over time with an emphasis on whether they entail recurrent processing. Displays were shown for 100 ms followed by pattern masks after ISIs of 0, 50, or 100 ms. The masking conditions were designed to add noise to recurrent processing and therefore to delay the outcome of processes in which they play a role. In Exp. 1, participants viewed two- and eight-region displays with homogeneous convex regions (homo- convex displays; the putatively ambiguous displays). In Exp. 2, participants viewed putatively unambiguous hetero-convex displays. In Exp. 3, displays and masks were presented to di erent eyes, thereby delaying mask interference in the thalamus for up to 100 ms. Results and discussion: The results of Exps. 1 and 2 are consistent with the interpretation that recurrent processing is involved in generating the convex figure CEs and resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays. The results of Exp. 3 suggested that corticofugal recurrent processing is involved in resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays and that cortico-cortical recurrent processes play a role in generating convex figure CEs and these two types of recurrent processes operate in parallel.Our results add to evidence that perceptual organization evolves dynamically and reveal that stimuli that seem unambiguous can be ambiguous during perceptual organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently emerging synthetic acoustically gender-ambiguous voices could contribute to dissolving the still prevailing genderism. Yet, are we indeed perceiving these voices as “unassignable”? Or are we trying to assimilate them into existing genders? To investigate the perceived ambiguity, we conducted an explorative 3 (male, female, ambiguous voice) × 3 (male, female, ambiguous topic) experiment. We found that, although participants perceived the gender-ambiguous voice as ambiguous, they used a profoundly wide range of the scale, indicating tendencies toward a gender. We uncovered a mild dissolve of gender roles. Neither the listener’s gender nor the personal gender stereotypes impacted the perception. However, the perceived topic gender indicated the perceived voice gender, and younger people tended to perceive a more male-like gender.

In recent years, researchers have discovered much about how disgust works, its neural basis, its relationship with immune function, its connection with mating, and some of its antecedents and consequents. Despite these advances in our understanding, an under-explored area is how disgust may be used to serve a communicative function, including how individuals might strategically downplay or exaggerate the disgust display in front of different audiences. Here, we generated two hypotheses about potential communicative functions of disgust, and tested these hypotheses in four countries (Turkey, Croatia, Germany, and Norway). We found no evidence in support of either hypothesis in any country. Discussion focuses on the likely falsity of the two central hypotheses, alternative interpretations of our findings, and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives Despite well-documented cognitive and physical declines with age, older adults tend to report higher emotional well-being than younger adults, even during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To understand this paradox, as well as investigate the effects of specific historical contexts, the current study examined age differences in emotion regulation related to the events of 2020 in the United States. We predicted that, due to older adults' theorized greater prioritization of hedonic goals and avoidance of arousal, older adults would report more positivity-upregulation and acceptance tactics than younger adults. Research Design and Methods Eighty-one younger adults (aged 18–25) and 85 older adults (age 55+) completed a retrospective survey on their emotion regulation tactic usage for 3 specific events: the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the killing of George Floyd, and the presidential election. Results Older adults tended to rely most on acceptance-focused tactics, while younger adults tended to rely on a more even variety of tactics. However, age differences in tactic preferences varied by event, possibly due to younger adults' greater emotion regulation flexibility. Discussion and Implications Older adults' higher emotional well-being may not be primarily a result of age differences in positivity-related emotion regulation tactics but more about differences in acceptance use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionPrevious experiments purportedly showed that image-based factors like convexity were sufficient for figure assignment. Recently, however, we found that the probability of perceiving a figure on the convex side of a central border was only slightly higher than chance for two-region displays and increased with the number of display regions; this increase was observed only when the concave regions were homogeneously colored. These convex figure context effects (CEs) revealed that figure assignment in these classic displays entails more than a response to local convexity. A Bayesian observer replicated the convex figure CEs using both a convexity object prior and a new, homogeneous background prior and made the novel prediction that the classic displays in which both the convex and concave regions were homogeneous were ambiguous during perceptual organization.MethodsHere, we report three experiments investigating the proposed ambiguity and examining how the convex figure CEs unfold over time with an emphasis on whether they entail recurrent processing. Displays were shown for 100 ms followed by pattern masks after ISIs of 0, 50, or 100 ms. The masking conditions were designed to add noise to recurrent processing and therefore to delay the outcome of processes in which they play a role. In Exp. 1, participants viewed two- and eight-region displays with homogeneous convex regions (homo-convex displays; the putatively ambiguous displays). In Exp. 2, participants viewed putatively unambiguous hetero-convex displays. In Exp. 3, displays and masks were presented to different eyes, thereby delaying mask interference in the thalamus for up to 100 ms.Results and discussionThe results of Exps. 1 and 2 are consistent with the interpretation that recurrent processing is involved in generating the convex figure CEs and resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays. The results of Exp. 3 suggested that corticofugal recurrent processing is involved in resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays and that cortico-cortical recurrent processes play a role in generating convex figure CEs and these two types of recurrent processes operate in parallel. Our results add to evidence that perceptual organization evolves dynamically and reveal that stimuli that seem unambiguous can be ambiguous during perceptual organization.

The present eye-tracking reading study investigated the real-time processing of the so-called Lifetime Effect, which involvesthe integration of temporal verb morphology and knowledge ofa referent’s lifetime (alive vs. dead). Critical stimuli containedfamous referents, meaning that their lifetime status is widelyknown. In addition, context sentences mentioned their lifetimestatus and occupation. Tense/aspect was manipulated in a fol-lowing target sentence to contain either the present perfect orthe simple future (e.g., She has performed / will perform...).For dead referents, the target sentence was infelicitous giventhe tense/aspectual marking; for living referents, the mark-ing was felicitous. This design permitted us to examine ef-fects of lifetime status conveyed via world knowledge and lin-guistic context on the processing of tense/aspect morphology.Eye-tracking reading times revealed longer total reading timesat the critical (verb) and post-critical regions for the presentperfect when following a deceased context, while the dead-simple future condition had shorter overall reading times thanany other condition. Naturalness ratings revealed the dead-simple future to be quickly and reliably rejected, while thedead-present perfect was deemed acceptable. However, thelatter was rated significantly lower than the living/present per-fect condition. Taken together, the results imply that worldknowledge and an immediate context defining a real-world ref-erent as being dead or alive can jointly modulate the processingof subsequent verb tense/aspect, but with striking differencesbetween the present perfect and simple future.

In an influential article, Shah et al. (2015) hypothesized that resource scarcity weakens the effect of irrelevant contextual factors on economic valuations. The hypothesis that "scarcity frames value" qualifies the applicability of standard theories of rational choice and suggests a revised psychological foundation. In support, Shah et al. showed that differences in the willingness to pay for a commodity depending on where it was purchased (a fancy hotel vs. a run-down store) and in the willingness to travel to receive a fixed discount depending on the size of the purchase (a cheap vs. an expensive computer) were smaller among those with low personal incomes. In a large-scale preregistered experiment (N = 3,442), we tested whether scarcity framed value during the COVID-19 pandemic as well. The sample exhibited the canonical context effects overall. Consistent with the hypothesis, these effects tended to be smaller among those facing higher scarcity of personal income. Extending the original findings, economic valuations of low-income earners improved, particularly when scarcity was on the minds of the participants, as those with high financial and other resource scarcity concerns were less susceptible to the context effects. Our findings indicate that scarcity frames value, especially when it is cognitively salient, and emphasize the importance of considering contextual factors when attempting replications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on multiattribute decision-making has repeatedly shown that people's preferences for options depend on the set of other options they are presented with, that is, the choice context. As a result, recent years have seen the development of a number of psychological theories explaining context effects. However, much less attention has been given to the statistical analyses of context effects. Traditionally, context effects are measured as a change in preference for a target option across two different choice sets (the so-called relative choice share of the target, or RST). We first show that the frequently used definition of the RST measure has some weaknesses and should be replaced by a more appropriate definition that we provide. We then show through a large-scale simulation that the RST measure as previously defined can lead to biased inferences. As an alternative, we suggest a Bayesian approach to estimating an accurate RST measure that is robust to various circumstances. We applied the two approaches to the data of five published studies (total participants, N = 738), some of which used the biased approach. Additionally, we introduce the absolute choice share of the target (or AST) as the appropriate measure for the attraction effect. Our approach is an example of evaluating and proposing proper statistical tests for axiomatic principles of decision-making. After applying the AST and the robust RST to published studies, we found qualitatively different results in at least one-fourth of the cases. These results highlight the importance of utilizing robust statistical tests as a foundation for the development of new psychological theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context effects in decision making refer to any influence on options evaluation resulting from its relational properties with other available alternatives. Over the last 40 years, a large corpus of research showed that decision makers are sensitive to irrelevant options and tend to modify their preferences depending on choice architecture. The attraction effect is a well‐known example of context effect, which describes an increase in preferences for an option when a dominated alternative is inserted in the choice set. Sequential sampling models (SSM) interpret decision biases as the result of a dynamic comparative process between the available options that alters subjective values attribution. Recently, SSM received empirical support from eye‐tracking studies that documented a decoy‐dependent allocation of attention. In this study, we integrate previous process‐tracing results using a new hidden‐attribute protocol, in which decision makers have to explore products' attributes, keep in mind their values, and deliberately compare the options. This new methodology allows this study to offer additional evidence on the role of decoys in the dynamic process of choice. In a consumer‐choice task, the addition of an asymmetrically dominated decoy first focused the attention on the target during attributes exploration, which in turn led to an increase in the dominant option preferences at the choice stage. This suggests that adding irrelevant options affects the information sampling procedures, insofar as the comparative process is influenced by the dominance relationship of the alternatives. These results are consistent with past eye‐tracking studies and verify previous connectionist theories of the attraction effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the known health benefits and the potential for substituting less environmentally sustainable consumed foods such as meat, the current intake of pulses in developed countries remains less than recommended. Barriers are related to sensory characteristics and lack of knowledge about preparation, while drivers of environmental benefits are intangible. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of additional information about health or environmental benefits of pulses on the acceptance of novel pulse‐based products from chickpeas, black beans, and faba beans. Perceptions of these pulse‐based spreads in a blind and informed stage were assessed with 202 consumers in urban and suburban areas of Denmark. In general, the familiar chickpea spread followed by the relatively most unfamiliar black bean spread was liked the most. Only for these two products, additional information increased hedonic perception, regardless of the context (health or environmental benefits). If consumers did not like the spread, as found for the faba bean spread, providing additional information did not significantly alter this perception. Participants' preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) in a discrete choice experiment corresponded to hedonic scores, whereas providing additional information increased the WTP. These findings suggest that extrinsic cues such as health or environmental benefits may only be useful in products with an acceptable baseline taste profile. Moreover, black beans might be investigated as a promising source for further product development due to their acceptance by consumers besides being the comparably most unfamiliar pulse type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the cognitive experience of novel pictorial scenes, using observers' words. On each of two critical trials, a single novel scene (a photo) was presented briefly, after which observers described what they saw. The reports were highly valid, assessed against details of the stimuli. The most frequent concepts used by the observers defined scene gist empirically – there was wide agreement on the basic scene interpretation. The average extent of the reports, or cognitive bandwidth, was fairly high overall: a median of 14.4 correct meaningful words per scene. However, there was a wide range of report lengths across observers. With length, the reports became increasingly elaborative and unique (and still correct). The longer reports document the richer and more unique side of a gist-to-elaboration continuum. In addition, a manipulation of immediately prior experience (priming with other scenes) caused an increase in the reporting of prime-related information, conveyed by a wide range of concepts, including relational concepts. The results are consistent with cognitive theories of perception and the claim of substantial cognitive bandwidth. Furthermore, the highly elaborative reports document a measured diversity of powerful scene understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]