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Attention is captured by information matching the contents of working memory. Though many factors modulate the amount of capture, there is surprising resistance to cognitive control. Capture occurs even when participants are instructed either that an item would never be a target or to drop that item from memory. Does the persistence of capture under these conditions reflect a rigidity in capture, or can properly motivated participants learn to completely suppress distractors and/or completely drop items from memory? Surprisingly, no studies have looked at the influence of extensive training of involuntary capture from working memory items. Here, we addressed whether training leads to a reduction or even elimination of memory-driven capture. After memorizing a single object, participants were cued to remember or to forget this object. Subsequently, they were asked to execute a search task. To measure capture, we compared search performances in displays that did and did not contain a distractor matching the earlier memorized object. Participants completed multiple experimental sessions over four days. The results showed that attentional capture by to-be-remembered distractors was reduced, but not eliminated in subsequent sessions compared with the first session. Training did not impact capture by to-be-forgotten objects. The results suggest observable, but limited, cognitive control over memory-driven capture.

Attribute amnesia describes the failure to unexpectedly report the attribute of an attended stimulus, likely reflecting a lack of working memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that unique meaningful objects are immune to attribute amnesia. However, these studies used highly dissimilar foils to test memory, raising the possibility that good performance at the surprise test was based on an imprecise (gist-like) form of long-term memory. In Experiment 1, we explored whether a more sensitive memory test would reveal attribute amnesia in meaningful objects. We used a four-alternative-forced-choice test with foils having mis-matched exemplar (e.g., apple pie/pumpkin pie) and/or state (e.g., cut/full) information. Errors indicated intact exemplar, but not state information. Thus, meaningful objects are vulnerable to attribute amnesia under the right conditions. In Experiments 2A-2D, we manipulated the familiarity signals of test items by introducing a critical object as a pre-surprise target. In the surprise trial, this critical item matched one of the foil choices. Participants selected the critical object at a higher rate, despite having no awareness of the repetition. By demonstrating that familiarity influences responses in this paradigm, we suggest that meaningful objects are not immune to attribute amnesia but instead side-step the effects of attribute amnesia.

Understanding how individual beliefs and societal values influence support for measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission is vital to developing and implementing effective prevention policies. Using both Just World Theory and Cultural Dimensions Theory, the present study considered how individual-level justice beliefs and country-level social values predict support for vaccination and quarantine policy mandates to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Data from an international survey of adults from 46 countries (N = 6424) were used to evaluate how individual-level beliefs about justice for self and others, as well as national values—that is, power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence—influence support for vaccination and quarantine behavioral mandates. Multilevel modeling revealed that support for vaccination and quarantine mandates were positively associated with individual-level beliefs about justice for self, and negatively associated with country-level uncertainty avoidance. Significant cross-level interactions revealed that beliefs about justice for self were associated more strongly with support for mandatory vaccination in countries high in individualism, whereas beliefs about justice for others were more strongly associated with support for vaccination and quarantine mandates in countries high in long-term orientation. Beliefs about justice and cultural values can independently and also interactively influence support for evidence-based practices to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as vaccination and quarantine. Understanding these multilevel influences may inform efforts to develop and implement effective prevention policies in varied national contexts.

Cross-societal differences in cooperation and trust among strangers in the provision of public goods may be key to understanding how societies are managing the COVID-19 pandemic. We report a survey conducted across 41 societies between March and May 2020 (N = 34,526), and test pre-registered hypotheses about how cross-societal differences in cooperation and trust relate to prosocial COVID-19 responses (e.g., social distancing), stringency of policies, and support for behavioral regulations (e.g., mandatory quarantine). We further tested whether cross-societal variation in institutions and ecologies theorized to impact cooperation were associated with prosocial COVID-19 responses, including institutional quality, religiosity, and historical prevalence of pathogens. We found substantial variation across societies in prosocial COVID-19 responses, stringency of policies, and support for behavioral regulations. However, we found no consistent evidence to support the idea that cross-societal variation in cooperation and trust among strangers is associated with these outcomes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These results were replicated with another independent cross-cultural COVID-19 dataset (N = 112,136), and in both snowball and representative samples. We discuss implications of our results, including challenging the assumption that managing the COVID-19 pandemic across societies is best modeled as a public goods dilemma.

BackgroundThe effective implementation of government policies and measures for controlling the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic requires compliance from the public. This study aimed to examine cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of trust in government regarding COVID-19 control with the adoption of recommended health behaviours and prosocial behaviours, and potential determinants of trust in government during the pandemic.MethodsThis study analysed data from the PsyCorona Survey, an international project on COVID-19 that included 23 733 participants from 23 countries (representative in age and gender distributions by country) at baseline survey and 7785 participants who also completed follow-up surveys. Specification curve analysis was used to examine concurrent associations between trust in government and self-reported behaviours. We further used structural equation model to explore potential determinants of trust in government. Multilevel linear regressions were used to examine associations between baseline trust and longitudinal behavioural changes.ResultsHigher trust in government regarding COVID-19 control was significantly associated with higher adoption of health behaviours (handwashing, avoiding crowded space, self-quarantine) and prosocial behaviours in specification curve analyses (median standardised β = 0.173 and 0.229, p < 0.001). Government perceived as well organised, disseminating clear messages and knowledge on COVID-19, and perceived fairness were positively associated with trust in government (standardised β = 0.358, 0.230, 0.056, and 0.249, p < 0.01). Higher trust at baseline survey was significantly associated with lower rate of decline in health behaviours over time (p for interaction = 0.001).ConclusionsThese results highlighted the importance of trust in government in the control of COVID-19.

In a retro-cue paradigm, after memorizing a set of objects, people are cued to remember only a subset. Improved memory from the retro-cue suggests that selection processes can benefit items stored in working memory. Does selection in working memory require attention? If so, an attention-demanding task should disrupt retro-cue effects. Studies using a dual-task paradigm have found mixed results, with only one study (Janczyk & Berryhill, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 76 (3), 715–724, 2014) showing a decreased retro-cue effect by a secondary task. Here we explore a potential issue in that study – the temporal overlap of the secondary task response with the memory test presentation. This raises questions about whether the secondary task was impairing selection processes in memory or was impacting the memory response. We replicated their paradigm by inserting a tone discrimination task at the retro-cue offset, but we also included a condition in which the tone task and the memory test were temporally separated. In Experiment 1, performing the tone task did not impair the retro-cue effect. In Experiment 2, we added an articulatory suppression task as in Janczyk and Berryhill’s study, and we found that the requirement to execute the tone task impaired retro-cue effects. This impairment was independent of whether the tone and memory tasks overlapped. These findings suggest that internal prioritization can be impaired by dual-task interference, but may only occur when such interference is robust enough, for example, due to switching between multiple tasks.

Does the strength of representations in long-term memory (LTM) depend on which type of attention is engaged? We tested participants’ memory for objects seen during visual search. We compared implicit memory for two types of objects—related-context nontargets that grabbed attention because they matched the target defining feature (i.e., color; top-down attention) and salient distractors that captured attention only because they were perceptually distracting (bottom-up attention). In Experiment 1, the salient distractor flickered, while in Experiment 2, the luminance of the salient distractor was alternated. Critically, salient and related-context nontargets produced equivalent attentional capture, yet related-context nontargets were remembered far better than salient distractors (and salient distractors were not remembered better than unrelated distractors). These results suggest that LTM depends not only on the amount of attention but also on the type of attention. Specifically, top-down attention is more effective in promoting the formation of memory traces than bottom-up attention. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-020-01856-y.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global health crisis. Consequently, many countries have adopted restrictive measures that caused a substantial change in society. Within this framework, it is reasonable to suppose that a sentiment of societal discontent, defined as generalized concern about the precarious state of society, has arisen. Literature shows that collectively experienced situations can motivate people to help each other. Since societal discontent is conceptualized as a collective phenomenon, we argue that it could influence intention to help others, particularly those who suffer from coronavirus. Thus, in the present study, we aimed (a) to explore the relationship between societal discontent and intention to help at the individual level and (b) to investigate a possible moderating effect of societal discontent at the country level on this relationship. To fulfil our purposes, we used data collected in 42 countries (N = 61,734) from the PsyCorona Survey, a cross-national longitudinal study. Results of multilevel analysis showed that, when societal discontent is experienced by the entire community, individuals dissatisfied with society are more prone to help others. Testing the model with longitudinal data (N = 3,817) confirmed our results. Implications for those findings are discussed in relation to crisis management. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement. New York University Abu Dhabi

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. Understanding the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine uptake is important to inform policy decisions and plan vaccination campaigns. The aims of this research were to: (1) explore the individual- and country-level determinants of intentions to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and (2) examine worldwide variation in vaccination intentions. This cross-sectional online survey was conducted during the first wave of the pandemic, involving 6697 respondents across 20 countries. Results showed that 72.9% of participants reported positive intentions to be vaccinated against COVID-19, whereas 16.8% were undecided, and 10.3% reported they would not be vaccinated. At the individual level, prosociality was a significant positive predictor of vaccination intentions, whereas generic beliefs in conspiracy theories and religiosity were negative predictors. Country-level determinants, including cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism and power distance, were not significant predictors of vaccination intentions. Altogether, this study identifies individual-level predictors that are common across multiple countries, provides further evidence on the importance of combating conspiracy theories, involving religious institutions in vaccination campaigns, and stimulating prosocial motives to encourage vaccine uptake.

Significance Attachment theory focuses on the primal form of emotional bonding between humans. Attachment is conceptualized as an innate behavioral system aimed at safeguarding against potential threats by assuring proximity to caring and supportive others. When individuals feel securely attached (thus feeling less threatened in most situations), the activation of the caregiving behavioral system (concern for others) is facilitated. With this research, we show that priming attachment security influences how much people care about and accept climate change via an increased empathy for humanity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this activation bypasses the resistance of politically conservative individuals to mitigate climate change. Overall, we show that attachment security–based stimuli can inform intervention and policymaking strategies to help fight climate change., Attachment theory is an ethological approach to the development of durable, affective ties between humans. We propose that secure attachment is crucial for understanding climate change mitigation, because the latter is inherently a communal phenomenon resulting from joint action and requiring collective behavioral change. Here, we show that priming attachment security increases acceptance (Study 1: n = 173) and perceived responsibility toward anthropogenic climate change (Study 2: n = 209) via increased empathy for others. Next, we demonstrate that priming attachment security, compared to a standard National Geographic video about climate change, increases monetary donations to a proenvironmental group in politically moderate and conservative individuals (Study 3: n = 196). Finally, through a preregistered field study conducted in the United Arab Emirates (Study 4: n = 143,558 food transactions), we show that, compared to a message related to carbon emissions, an attachment security–based message is associated with a reduction in food waste. Taken together, our work suggests that an avenue to promote climate change mitigation could be grounded in core ethological mechanisms associated with secure attachment.

Items held in working memory (WM) capture attention (memory-driven capture). People can selectively prioritize specific object features in WM. Here, we examined whether feature-specific prioritization within WM modulates memory-driven capture. In Experiment 1, after remembering the color and orientation of a triangle, participants were instructed, via retro-cue, whether the color, the orientation, or both features were relevant. To measure capture, we asked participants to execute a subsequent search task, and we compared performance in displays that did and did not contain the memory-matching feature. Color attracted attention only when it was relevant. No capture by orientation was found. In Experiment 2, we presented the retro-cue at one of the four locations of the search display to direct attention to specific objects. We found capture by color and this capture was larger when it was indicated as relevant. Crucially, orientation also attracted attention, but only when it was relevant. These findings provide evidence for reciprocal interaction between internal prioritization and external attention on the features level. Specifically, internal feature-specific prioritization modulates memory-driven capture but this capture also depends on the salience of the features.

This paper examines whether compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures is motivated by wanting to save lives or save the economy (or both), and which implications this carries to fight the pandemic. National representative samples were collected from 24 countries (N=25,435). The main predictors were (i) perceived risk to contract coronavirus, (ii) perceived risk to suffer economic losses due to coronavirus, and (iii) their interaction effect. Individual and country-level variables were added as covariates in multilevel regression models. We examined compliance with various preventive health behaviors and support for strict containment policies. Results show that perceived economic risk consistently predicted mitigation behavior and policy support - and its effects were positive. Perceived health risk had mixed effects. Only two significant interactions between health and economic risk were identified – both positive. These results do not corroborate the view that people engage in health versus economy zero-sum thinking in the fight against COVID-19.

Previous studies suggested that public trust in government is vital for implementations of social policies that rely on public's behavioural responses. This study examined associations of trust in government regarding COVID-19 control with recommended health behaviours and prosocial behaviours. Data from an international survey with representative samples (N=23,733) of 23 countries were analysed. Specification curve analysis showed that higher trust in government was significantly associated with higher adoption of health and prosocial behaviours in all reasonable specifications of multilevel linear models (median standardised β=0.173 and 0.244, P

Attachment is an ethological approach to the development of durable affective ties between humans. We propose that secure attachment is crucial to understand climate change mitigation because the latter is inherently a communal phenomenon resulting from joint action, and requiring collective behavioral change. Here we show that secure (vs. insecure) attachment is associated with a higher willingness to pay taxes and prices to mitigate climate change (Study 1 N=1006 U.S. nationally representative sample). We also establish that priming attachment security increases acceptance (Study 2 N=173) and perceived responsibility about anthropogenic climate change (Study 3 N=209). Next, we show that priming attachment security, compared to a standard National Geographic video about climate change, increases monetary donations to a proenvironmental group in politically moderate and conservative individuals (Study 4 N=196). Lastly, in a preregistered field study conducted in the United Arab Emirates involving 130 nationalities (Study 5 N=143,558 food transactions), we show that an attachment-based message reduces food waste compared to a message related to carbon emissions. Our work suggests that a new avenue to promote climate change mitigation could be grounded in core ethological mechanisms associated with secure attachment.

No consensus exists regarding which are the most effective mechanisms to promote household action on climate change. We present a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials comprising 3,092,678 observations, which estimates the effects of behavioural interventions holding other factors constant. Here we show that behavioural interventions promote climate change mitigation to a very small degree while the intervention lasts (d = -0.093 95% CI -0.160, -0.055), with no evidence of sustained positive effects once the intervention ends. With the exception of recycling, most household mitigation behaviours show a low behavioural plasticity. The intervention with the highest average effect size is choice architecture (nudges) but this strategy has been tested in a limited number of behaviours. Our results do not imply behavioural interventions are less effective than alternative strategies such as financial incentives or regulations, nor exclude the possibility that behavioural interventions could have stronger effects when used in combination with alternative strategies.

Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no-longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also occur in the absence of any concurrent to-be-remembered information. In the current study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to memorize a single object that could be followed by a cue to forget or remember this object. Following the cue, we assessed the object’s activation in VWM by determining whether a matching distractor would capture attention in a visual search task. The results showed that, compared to a cue to remember, a cue to forget led to a reduced likelihood of attentional capture by a matching distractor. In addition, we found that capture effects by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten distractors remained stable as the interval between the onset of the cue and the search task increased from 700 ms to 3900 ms. We conclude that, in the absence of any to-be-remembered objects, an instruction to forget an object held in WM leads to a rapid but incomplete deactivation of the representation of that object, thus allowing it to continue to produce a weak biasing effect on attentional selection for several seconds after the instruction to forget.

Highlights • Risk perception of COVID-19 was associated with more negative/less positive emotions. • Risk perception of COVID-19 was inversely associated with subsequent mental health. • The association between risk perception and mental health was mediated by emotions. • Specification curve analysis was used to avoid subjective analytical decisions., Background Although there are increasing concerns on mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, no large-scale population-based studies have examined the associations of risk perception of COVID-19 with emotion and subsequent mental health. Methods : This study analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal data from the PsyCorona Survey that included 54,845 participants from 112 countries, of which 23,278 participants are representative samples of 24 countries in terms of gender and age. Specification curve analysis (SCA) was used to examine associations of risk perception of COVID-19 with emotion and self-rated mental health. This robust method considers all reasonable model specifications to avoid subjective analytical decisions while accounting for multiple testing. Results : All 162 multilevel linear regressions in the SCA indicated that higher risk perception of COVID-19 was significantly associated with less positive or more negative emotions (median standardised β=-0.171, median SE=0.004, P0.05). Limitations Reliance on self-reported data. Conclusions : Risk perception of COVID-19 was associated with emotion and ultimately mental health. Interventions on reducing excessive risk perception and managing emotional distress could promote mental health.

Previous studies have shown that information held in working memory (WM) actively or as a residue of previous processing can lead to attentional capture by corresponding stimuli in the environment. Here, we compared attentional capture by goal-driven and residual WM activation and exam- ined how these effects are affected by dual-task interference. In two experiments, participants performed an animacy judg- ment task for a word that they did or did not have to remember for a later recognition test. The word was followed in half of the trials by an arithmetic task that served to disrupt the WM activation of the previously processed word. Subsequently, WM-driven capture was assessed by having participants per- form a single-target rapid serial visual presentation task in which a line drawing corresponding to the word was presented shortly before a target. The results showed that the line draw- ing captured attention irrespective of the presence of the arith- metic task when the word had to be remembered. In compar- ison, the animacy judgment alone resulted in capture only when the arithmetic task was absent, and this effect was equal- ly strong as the capture effect caused by a to-be-remembered word. Taken together, these findings show that although re- sidual and goal-driven WM activation may be equally potent in guiding attentional selection, these two forms of WM acti- vation differ in that residual activation is overwritten by an attention-demanding task, whereas goal-driven WM activa- tion can lead to the reinstatement of a stimulus after performing such a task.

Long reaction times (RT) paradoxically occur with extremely loud auditory stimuli ( Van der Molen & Keuss, 1979 , 1981 ) or with ultrabright and large visual stimuli ( Jaśkowski & Włodarczyk, 2006 ) when the task requires a response choice. Van der Molen and Keuss (1981 ) hypothesized that this effect results from an arousal-driven elongation of response-selection processes. We tested this hypothesis using visual stimuli and chronopsychophysiological markers. The results showed that the latency of both early (P1 recorded at Oz) and late (P300) evoked potentials decreased monotonically with intensity. In contrast, the latency of stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potentials (LRP) abruptly increased for the most intense stimuli, thus mirroring the reaction time–intensity relationship. Response-locked LRPs revealed no dependency on intensity. These findings suggest that the processes responsible for the van der Molen-Keuss effect influence processing stages that are completed before the onset of LRP. The van der Molen-Keuss effect likely occurs later than those represented by early sensory potentials. This is in keeping with the hypothesis of van der Molen-Keuss.

The aim of the current study was to examine whether depth of encoding influences attentional capture by recently attended objects. In Experiment 1, participants first had to judge whether a word referred to a living or a nonliving thing (deep encoding condition) or whether the word was written in lower- or uppercase (shallow encoding condition), and they then had to identify a digit displayed midway in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of 8 pictures. A picture corresponding to the previously processed word was presented either before or after the target digit. The results showed that this picture captured attention, thus resulting in an attentional blink for identification of a target digit, in the deep encoding condition but not in the shallow encoding condition. In Experiment 2, this capture effect was found to be abolished when an additional working-memory (WM) task was performed directly after the word-judgment task, suggesting that the capture effect stemmed from residual WM activation that could be erased by means of a secondary WM task. Taken together, these results suggest that deep and shallow encoding result in different degrees of WM activation, which in turn influences the likelihood of memory-driven attentional capture.