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Using a prototype approach, we assessed people's lay conceptions of intuition and analysis. Open-ended descriptions of intuition and analysis were generated by participants (Study 1) and resulting exemplars were sorted into features subsequently rated in centrality by independent participants (Study 2). Feature centrality was validated by showing that participants were quicker and more accurate in classifying central (as compared to peripheral) features (Study 3). Centrality ratings suggested a single-factor structure describing analysis but revealed that participants held lay conceptions of intuition as involving two different types of processes: (1) as an automatic, affective, and non-logical processing, and (2) as a holistic processing that can assist in problem-solving. Additional analyses showed that the centrality ratings of intuition's facets were predicted by participants' self-reported intuitive style, suggesting intuition is differently perceived by intuitive and non-intuitive people. We discuss the implications of these results for the study of intuition and analysis.

In this paper, we conducted a meta-analytic review to examine the impact of social presence on individuals' performance on the Stroop task, shedding light on the cognitive processes underlying social facilitation. We followed PRISMA guidelines to identify and include 33 relevant studies in a multivariate random-effects meta-analysis. Our results show that social presence reliably modulates Stroop interference (a measure of cognitive control); specifically, participants exhibit lower Stroop interference when performing the task in the presence of others compared to performing it in isolation. We also found that the strength of the effect varies depending on the type of social presence: it is stronger with an attentive audience compared to an inattentive one, and null with an evaluative audience. Additionally, different features of the Stroop task itself moderate the effect; the effect is stronger for the classic version of the task compared to the semantic version, and for experiments that use mixed within-block trials compared to those with homogenous blocks. We also observed a negative relationship between the number of trials and the magnitude of the effect. Overall, these findings provide insights into the mechanisms by which the presence of others affects performance on the Stroop task, and how they align with social facilitation theories., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Introduction: People's estimates of perceptual quantities are commonly biased by the contextual presence of other quantities (like numbers). In this study, we address assimilation anchoring effects (approximation of real quantities to contextual quantities) that occur for visually displayed proportions, defining a new methodological setting for the effect., Method: Similar to classic approaches, we asked participants across several trials whether the display contained a feature in a proportion higher or lower than "a randomly selected value" (relative judgments), and then estimated the feature proportions (absolute judgments). Across all trials, we presented seven anchors ranging from .20 to .80, each with a visually displayed representation of the same seven proportions (49 judgments in total). This allowed for a psychophysical approach to individual estimates and signal detection indexes, providing new insights into how the anchoring effect is generated in this setting., Results: Our findings suggest that anchoring effects occur both as a bias (changes in response criteria) and as a change in the ability to discriminate stimuli (affecting sensitivity indexes). Moreover, anchors modulate the level of stimuli features for which estimates were more uncertain. Finally, our results indicate that anchor effects occur immediately in the first phase of the two-phase paradigm, leading to the availability of values for supporting absolute estimates., Conclusion: By using a psychophysical approach to the anchoring effects, for the first time, we could clarify that this effect is the result of both bias and changes in the ability to discriminate quantity., (© 2023 The Authors. Brain and Behavior published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Recent research suggests that the cognitive monitoring system of control could be using negative affective cues intrinsic to changes in information processing to initiate top-down regulatory mechanisms. Here, we propose that positive feelings of ease-of-processing could be picked up by the monitoring system as a cue indicating that control is not necessary, leading to maladaptive control adjustments. We simultaneously target control adjustments driven by task context and on a trial-by-trial level, macro-, and micro-adjustments. This hypothesis was tested using a Stroop-like task comprised trials varying in congruence and perceptual fluency. A pseudo randomisation procedure within different proportion of congruence conditions was used to maximise discrepancy and fluency effects. Results suggest that in a mostly congruent context participants committed more fast errors when incongruent trials were easy-to-read. Moreover, within the mostly incongruent condition, we also found more errors on incongruent trials after experiencing the facilitation effect of repeated congruent trials. These results suggest that transient and sustained feelings of processing fluency can downregulate control mechanisms, leading to failed adaptive adjustments to conflict., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

In the present work, we present normative data for a set of 39 original clipart-style images that can be used as material in studies involving judgements of proportion. The original images are drawings that depict different day-to-day scenarios (e.g., lighted windows in a building; books on a shelf) and each has seven variants of different proportions (from 20% to 80%) belonging to different categories (discrete vs continuous; social vs non-social; natural vs artificial; stimuli physical dimensions; number of referents). Normative data for these images are presented in an interactive database (available at https://judgment-images-and-norms.shinyapps.io/estimates_interactive/ ), corresponding to the means of proportion estimates (in percentage form), the perceived ease of making such estimates, the perceived level of familiarity and liking for each image, and the relationships between these variables. In the paper, we analyse the data at an individual level, addressing how the latter judgements are related to the proportion estimates, how those estimates are related to objective proportions, and how these relationships are moderated by image category. The analyses presented in this paper aim to aid readers in selecting images that enable them to better address specific influences on proportional estimates or to control for those influences in their studies., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Deontic norms are expected to impose individuals' control over their behavior. In this paper, we address such norms presented in traffic signs and test their influence over executive control functions. For Experiment 1, we develop a traffic flanker task in which the typical neutral arrows are replaced with traffic prohibition/obligation signs. Experiment 2 isolated the deontic aspect of the signs using simple arrows on red, blue, and green backgrounds and either primed them to be interpreted as traffic signs or as elements of a gaming console controller. Results in both studies show evidence of controlling context interferences more efficiently when dealing with deontic (traffic) signs than with simple arrows (Experiment 1) or with similar perceptive targets when primed with a deontic context than with a gaming context (Experiment 2). In both studies, obligation/blue signs mitigate flanker effects less than prohibition/red signs. Stimuli color affects the alertness of the cognitive system, with the color red being, by itself, a cue for increased control. Based on temporal analysis, we further discuss these results as evidence of an increase in proactive control that aims to prevent the occurrence of undesirable influence., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Inhibitory control (IC) is defined as the (in)ability to change, suppress, or delay a response that is no longer required under the current circumstances. This ability was previously argued to increase in social contexts, based on Stroop's performance, showing that participants performed the Stroop task better in others' presence than alone. In this paper, we extend the testing of this same hypothesis to the use of two other tasks that Mitake et al. (2000) show to grasp the same IC ability; the Antisaccade and Stop signal tasks. If Stroop's performance was capturing the impact of the presence of others on CI abilities, the effect would generalize to performance on these tasks. This hypothesis was only generally supported by stop signal task performance; those in the presence condition were significantly more efficient than those in the alone conditions. For the Antisaccade tasks, evidence shows that higher levels of interference occurs in the presence of others condition for participants' fastest responses We discuss how this evidence contributes to the literature suggesting that the two tasks may index different constructs.

Conflict and perceptual disfluency have been shown to lead to adaptive, sequential, control adjustments. Here, we propose that these effects can be additive, suggesting their integration into a general feeling of disfluent information processing. This hypothesis was tested using an interference task that dynamically mixed trials varying in legibility and/or congruence. Moreover, the manipulation of the proportion of congruent trials within the task allowed differentiating conditions in which these experiences of fluency may vary. Results showed that progressive increases in processing disfluency elicited a matching decrease in the interference of incongruent fluent trials. This linear effect was significant for all proportion of congruence conditions, although lower when incongruent trials were more frequent. These results highlight the role of feelings in the initiation of control and suggest that the monitoring system could be using changes in information processing fluency as a need-for-control signal., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Previous research has mostly approached face recognition and target identification by focusing on face perception mechanisms, but memory mechanisms also appear to play a role. Here, we examined how the presence of a mask interferes with the memory mechanisms involved in face recognition, focusing on the dynamic interplay between encoding and recognition processes. We approach two known memory effects: (a) matching study and test conditions effects (i.e., by presenting masked and/or unmasked faces) and (b) testing expectation effects (i.e., knowing in advance that a mask could be put on or taken off). Across three experiments using a yes/no recognition paradigm, the presence of a mask was orthogonally manipulated at the study and the test phases. All data showed no evidence of matching effects. In Experiment 1, the presence of masks either at study or test impaired the correct identification of a target. But in Experiments 2 and 3, in which the presence of masks at study or test was manipulated within participants, only masks presented at test-only impaired face identification. In these conditions, test expectations led participants to use similar encoding strategies to process masked and unmasked faces. Across all studies, participants were more liberal (i.e., used a more lenient criterion) when identifying masked faces presented at the test. We discuss these results and propose that to better understand how people may identify a face wearing a mask, researchers should take into account that memory is an active process of discrimination, in which expectations regarding test conditions may induce an encoding strategy that enables overcoming perceptual deficits., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Consumer products are widely used as stimuli across several research fields. The use of consumer products as experimental stimuli lacks, however, the support of normative data regarding product features variability. In this work, we provide a first set of norms for people's perceptions of 150 consumer products regarding six relevant dimensions: product perceived complexity, quality objectivity, material/experiential nature, perceived price, familiarity and attitude. Products available in this normative database showed good overall distribution across the range of the dimensions evaluated. Obtained correlations between some of these dimensions provided evidence of how they can be confounded across products, further justifying the need to control for these dimensions. These norms should aid future research by allowing researchers to select products according to specific attributes and achieve appropriate experimental control. The norms here provided should also aid consumer behavior practitioners (such as marketers and advertisers) by providing insights as to how consumers perceive products along relevant dimensions., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The current meta-analysis accumulates empirical findings for the familiarity temporal effect (FTE) in duration judgments (the duration of more familiar stimuli is judged to be longer than that of less familiar stimuli). It brings together data from 2 separate literatures: time perception and processing fluency. In doing so, this review offers more and stronger evidence for testing the reliability of the effect; it defines the relevant moderators for addressing the validity of the 2 main explanations for the FTE: the attentional and the fluency-attributional hypotheses. The analysis (random effect model) of a total of 128 experiments (N = 3,338) showed that the effect of familiarity on perceived short durations (seconds) is highly reliable (g = .52); the same (or a similar) effect also occurs for other fluency manipulations (g = .51). The analysis supports assumptions generated by both the attentional and the fluency-misattributional explanations, suggesting that more research is needed to understand their possible dynamic relationship. Hence, this meta-analysis provides important guidance for future research with regard to time estimates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Data from two experiments show that the experienced structure of a category (i.e., as having high vs. low variability) modulates the impact of context on evaluative judgments of individual exemplars. Target objects (unfamiliar in Experiment 1 and familiar in Experiment 2) were primed with positive and negative images while varying the number (Experiment 1) or typicity (Experiment 2) of exemplars known from a category prior to the judgment task. The results show that evaluations of object valence were more influenced by valenced context cues in high than in low variability category conditions. These results are taken as evidence that more varied exemplar-based category representations facilitate context effects on stimulus evaluation.

Time perception relies on the motor system. Involves core brain regions of this system, including those associated with feelings generated from sensorimotor states. Perceptual timing is also distorted when movement occurs during timing tasks, possibly by interfering with sensorimotor afferent feedback. However, it is unknown if the perception of time is an active process associated with specific patterns of muscle activity. We explored this idea based on the phenomenon of electromyographic gradients, which consists of the dynamic increase of muscle activity during cognitive tasks that require sustained attention, a critical function in perceptual timing. We aimed to determine whether facial muscle dynamic activity indexes the subjective representation of time. We asked participants to judge stimuli durations (varying in familiarity) while we monitored the time course of the activity of the zygomaticus-major and corrugator-supercilii muscles, both associated with cognitive and affective feelings. The dynamic electromyographic activity in corrugator-supercilii over time reflected objective time and this relationship predicted subjective judgments of duration. Furthermore, the zygomaticus-major muscle signaled the bias that familiarity introduces in duration judgments. This suggests that subjective duration could be an embodiment process based in motor information changing over time and their associated feelings.

Previous research has shown that fluency effects are driven by discrepancies between current and baseline fluency. Thus, illusions of truth associated with repetition (which increases statement fluency and its perceived truth-value relative to new statements) are less likely to occur when participants judge pure lists of either all-repeated or all-new statements and comparisons are between-participants, than when participants judge mixed lists and comparisons are within-participants. Still, there are demonstrations of between-participants illusions of truth in the literature. In this manuscript, we explain the emergence of between-participants truth effects in terms of hypothetical dynamic updating of fluency standards. The findings of two experiments provide evidence for this hypothesis by showing that between-participants truth effects occur most strongly for the first elements of the statement list but are reduced over time. The findings suggest that the dynamics of fluency experiences contribute to the truth effect and should be taken into account when investigating illusions of truth., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The statement "what is beautiful is good" reflects a persuasive heuristic that may be supported either by a general association of attractiveness with positivity or by a specific association with the perceived credibility of an attractive source. In one study (N = 58), we approach this question using an explicit and an implicit measure (Stroop Task) to assess whether attractiveness is more likely associated with valenced words when these are related (vs. unrelated) to credibility. Results show that this effect occurs but only for the implicit measure. When the word-face associations were made at an explicit level, we found a general association between positivity and attractiveness, unrestricted to the dimension of credibility. We discuss how these results inform about attractiveness as a shortcut to judgments of validity.

We contrast the effects of conceptual and perceptual fluency resulting from repetition in the truth effect. In Experiment 1, participants judged either verbatim or paraphrased repetitions, which reduce perceptual similarity to original statements. Judgments were made either immediately after the first exposure to the statements or after one week. Illusions of truth emerged for both types of repetition, with delay reducing both effects. In Experiment 2, participants judged verbatim and paraphrased repetitions with either the same or a contradictory meaning of original statements. In immediate judgments, illusions of truth emerged for repetitions with the same meaning and illusions of falseness for contradictory repetitions. In the delayed session, the illusion of falseness disappeared for contradictory statements. Results are discussed in terms of the contributions of recollection of stimulus details and of perceptual and conceptual fluency to illusions of truth at different time intervals and judgmental context conditions., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Two experiments contrast the effects of fluency due to repetition and fluency due to color contrast on judgments of truth, after participants learn to associate high levels of fluency with falseness (i.e., a reversal of the fluency-truth link). Experiment 1 shows that the interpretation of fluency as a sign of truth is harder to reverse when learning is promoted with repetition rather than with perceptual fluency. Experiment 2 shows that when color contrast and repetition are manipulated orthogonally, the reversal of the truth effect learned with color contrast does not generalize to repetition. These results suggest specificities in the processing experiences generated by different sources of fluency, and that their influences can be separated in contexts that allow the contrast of their distinctive features. We interpret and discuss these results in light of the research addressing the convergence vs. dissociation of the effects elicited by different fluency sources.

This paper tests the hypothesis that social presence influences size perception by increasing context sensitivity. Consistent with Allport's prediction, we expected to find greater context sensitivity in participants who perform a visual task in the presence of other people (i.e., in co-action) than in participants who perform the task in isolation. Supporting this hypothesis, participants performing an Ebbinghaus illusion-based task in co-action showed greater size illusions than those performing the task in isolation. Specifically, participants in a social context had greater difficulty perceiving the correct size of a target circle and ignoring its surroundings. Analyses of delta plot functions suggest a mechanism of interference monitoring, since that when individuals take longer to respond, they are better able to ignore the surrounding circles. However, this type of monitoring interference was not moderated by social presence. We discuss how this lack of moderation might be the reason why the impact of social presence on context sensitivity is able to be detected in tasks such as the Ebbinghaus illusion.

A robust finding in social psychology research is that performance is modulated by the social nature of a given context, promoting social inhibition or facilitation effects. In the present experiment, we examined if and how social presence impacts holistic face perception processes by asking participants, in the presence of others and alone, to perform the composite face task. Results suggest that completing the task in the presence of others (i.e., mere co-action) is associated with better performance in face recognition (less bias and higher discrimination between presented and non-presented targets) and with a reduction in the composite face effect. These results make clear that social presence impact on the composite face effect does not occur because presence increases reliance on holistic processing as a "dominant" well-learned response, but instead, because it increases monitoring of the interference produced by automatic response., (Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Loftus (Memory & Cognition 6:312-319, 1978) distinguished between interpretable and uninterpretable interactions. Uninterpretable interactions are ambiguous, because they may be due to two additive main effects (no interaction) and a nonlinear relationship between the (latent) outcome variable and its indicator. Interpretable interactions can only be due to the presence of a true interactive effect in the outcome variable, regardless of the relationship that it establishes with its indicator. In the present article, we first show that same problem can arise when an unmeasured mediator has a nonlinear effect on the measured outcome variable. Then we integrate Loftus's arguments with a seemingly contradictory approach to interactions suggested by Rosnow and Rosenthal (Psychological Bulletin 105:143-146, 1989). We show that entire data patterns, not just interaction effects alone, produce interpretable or noninterpretable interactions. Next, we show that the same problem of interpretability can apply to main effects. Lastly, we give concrete advice on what researchers can do to generate data patterns that provide unambiguous evidence for hypothesized interactions.

It has been proposed in the literature that the testosterone (T) response to competition in humans may be modulated by cognitive variables. In a previous experiment with a female sample we have reported that opponent familiarity and threat appraisal moderated the T response to competition in women. With this experiment we aim to investigate if these variables have the same impact on males T response to competition, extending the previous findings in our lab. Forty male participants (20 dyads) were recruited to engage in a same sex, face to face competition using the Number Tracking Test as a competitive task. Levels of T, cortisol (C) and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) were measured before and 20 min after the competition. Results show that losers report higher levels of threat than winners and increased their T levels after the competition, however this T change was not predicted by opponent familiarity or threat appraisal. No variation was detected for C and DHEA levels. These findings suggest that there could be sex differences for the moderators/mediators of the T response to competition in humans.

This paper integrates the motivational states of challenge and threat within a dual processing perspective. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals experience a challenge state when individuals have sufficient resources to cope with the demands of a task (Blascovich et al., 1993). Because the experience of resource availability has been shown to be associated with superficial processing (Garcia-Marques and Mackie, 2007), we tested the hypothesis that challenge is associated with superficial processing in two persuasion experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that inducing attitudes of participants in a challenge state was not sensitive to the quality of arguments presented. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the effect occurs even when task engagement, manipulated by the presence (vs. the absence) of a task observer (Blascovich et al., 1993), is high. The implications of these results for the biopsychosocial model model and the cognitive and motivational literature are discussed.

Social interactions elicit androgen responses whose function has been posited to be the adjustment of androgen-dependent behaviors to social context. The activation of this androgen response is known to be mediated and moderated by psychological factors. In this study we tested the hypothesis that the testosterone (T) changes after a competition are not simply related to its outcome, but rather to the way the subject evaluates the event. In particular we tested two evaluative dimensions of a social interaction: familiarity with the opponent and the subjective evaluation of the outcome as threat or challenge. Challenge/threat occurs in goal relevant situations and represent different motivational states arising from the individuals' subjective evaluation of the interplay between the task demands and coping resources possessed. For challenge the coping resources exceed the task demands, while threat represents a state where coping resources are insufficient to meet the task demands. In this experiment women competed in pairs, against a same sex opponent using the number tracking test as a competitive task. Losers appraised the competition outcome as more threatening than winners, and displayed higher post-competition T levels than winners. No differences were found either for cortisol (C) or for dehydroepiandrosterone. Threat, familiarity with the opponent and T response were associated only in the loser condition. Moderation analysis suggests that for the women that lost the competition the effect of threat on T is moderated by familiarity with the opponent.

In the present research, we investigated the influence of native-language adjective-noun word order on category accessibility for nouns and adjectives by comparing Portuguese speakers (in whose language nouns precede adjectives) with English speakers (in whose language adjectives precede nouns). In two studies, we presented participants with different numbers of verbal or pictorial stimuli, and subsequently they answered questions about noun- and adjective-conditioned frequencies. The results demonstrated a primacy effect of native-language word order. Specifically, although both populations showed a speed advantage for noun-conditioned questions, this tendency was significantly stronger for Portuguese than for American participants. We discuss the important role of native-language syntax rules for the categorization and representation of information.

Repeated statements are perceived as more valid than novel ones, termed the illusion of truth effect, presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity. In 3 studies, the authors examined the conditions under which and the processes by which familiarity signals from repetition and argument quality signals from processing of message content influenced agreement with persuasive arguments. Participants with low or high motivation to process information were presented persuasive arguments seen once or twice. In all 3 studies, repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments when little processing of message content occurred. Two of the studies used a process dissociation procedure to reveal that both greater controlled processing (which reflected argument content) and the greater automatic influence of familiarity (which reflected repetition) were associated with increased acceptance of strong arguments but that greater controlled processing dissipated the benefits of familiarity for agreement with weak arguments.

Given that familiarity is closely associated with positivity, the authors sought evidence for the idea that positivity would increase perceived familiarity. In Experiment 1, smiling and thus positively perceived novel faces were significantly more likely to be incorrectly judged as familiar than novel faces with neutral expressions. In Experiment 2, subliminal association with positive affect (a positively valenced prime) led to false recognition of novel words as familiar. In Experiment 3, validity judgments, known to be influenced by familiarity, were more likely to occur if participants were in happy mood states than neutral mood states. Despite their different paradigms and approaches, the results of these three studies converge on the idea that, at least under certain circumstances, the experience of positivity itself can signal familiarity, perhaps because the experience of familiarity is typically positive.

To assess the persuasive impact of prior source exposure, two studies paired persuasive messages with a source to whom participants had previously been exposed subliminally, explicitly, or not at all. In Experiment 2, participants' attention also was drawn to information that potentially undermined the implications of any reaction to re-exposure. Compared to no exposure, prior subliminal exposure increased the source's persuasiveness, an effect not mediated by source liking. Explicit exposure increased source persuasiveness to the extent that the source was liked more and only absent a recall cue. Results favored misattributional accounts of prior exposure effects.