Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Online misinformation is disproportionality created and spread by people with extreme political attitudes, especially among the far-right. There is a debate in the literature about why people spread misinformation and what should be done about it. According to the purely cognitive account, people largely spread misinformation because they are lazy, not biased. According to a motivational account, people are also motivated to believe and spread misinformation for ideological and partisan reasons. To better understand the psychological and neurocognitive processes that underlie misinformation sharing among the far-right, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment with conservatives and far-right partisans in the Unites States and Spain (N = 1,609) and a neuroimaging study with far-right partisans in Spain (N = 36). Far-right partisans in Spain and U.S. Republicans who highly identify with Trump were more likely to share misinformation than center-right voters and other Republicans, especially when the misinformation was related to sacred values (e.g., immigration). Sacred values predicted misinformation sharing above and beyond familiarity, attitude strength, and salience of the issue. Moreover, far-right partisans were unresponsive to fact-checking and accuracy nudges. At a neural level, this group showed increased activity in brain regions implicated in mentalizing and norm compliance in response to posts with sacred values. These results suggest that the two components of political devotion-identity fusion and sacred values-play a key role in misinformation sharing, highlighting the identity-affirming dimension of misinformation sharing. We discuss the need for motivational and identity-based interventions to help curb misinformation for high-risk partisan groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Why do socioeconomic disparities in achievement emerge so early in life? Previous answers to this question have generally focused on the perceived deficits of parents from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g., insufficient childrearing knowledge). Here, we instead focus on the structure of early childhood education and argue that early schooling contexts provide unequal opportunities for engagement to children of higher versus lower socioeconomic status (SES). As engagement is a longitudinal predictor of achievement, early SES disparities in engagement could serve to maintain or even exacerbate SES disparities in achievement. In Study 1 (1,236 observations; N = 98 children), we investigated preschool students' behavioral engagement during whole-class discussions-a core aspect of early childhood education. Low-SES children showed significantly lower engagement than their peers. Consistent with the claim of unequal opportunities for engagement, these differences were not accounted for by SES differences in language proficiency. As students' engagement in school is influenced by their peers' attitudes toward them, we also examined peer perceptions (Study 2, N = 94, and a meta-analysis, k = 2 studies). We found that preschoolers who show more engagement relative to others during whole-class discussions are perceived as possessing more positive qualities (e.g., intelligence). Given that higher-SES students are afforded more opportunities for engagement (see Study 1), they may be the ones benefiting from these positive peer perceptions as well, which might further boost their engagement. Our results suggest that aspects of early childhood education should be redesigned to foster engagement among all students, regardless of their SES. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Theories of episodic memory posit that more attentional resources are needed for encoding specific compared to gist representations. This position has been challenged by recent findings of similar divided attention (DA) at encoding costs on both specific and gist representations. However, the disrupting effects of DA on specific representations may emerge under less difficult DA conditions than those under which effects on gist representations emerge. The present study addressed this possibility by manipulating the difficulty of a concurrent DA task (low, intermediate, or high difficulty) during encoding among 176 young adult participants, who encoded face-scene pairs under either full attention or one of the three levels of DA. During retrieval, participants discriminated intact pairs from recombined pairs that varied in how similar they were to studied pairs. Results, interpreted using a multinomial-processing-tree model of specific and gist memory, showed that the disrupting effects of DA on specific representations emerged under less difficult attentional loads (intermediate-demanding condition) compared to those under which gist representations were disrupted (high-demanding condition). These findings reinforce the suggestion of differential attentional demands for specific and gist representations and also provide insights into attentional resource theories of adult age-related cognitive decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

When people estimate the quantities of objects (e.g., country populations), are then presented with the objects' actual quantities, and subsequently asked to remember their initial estimates, responses are often distorted towards the actual quantities. This hindsight bias-traditionally considered to reflect a cognitive error-has more recently been proposed to result from adaptive knowledge updating. But how to conceptualize such knowledge-updating processes and their potentially beneficial consequences? Here, we provide a framework that conceptualizes knowledge updating in the context of hindsight bias in real-world estimation by connecting it with research on seeding effects-improvements in people's estimation accuracy after exposure to numerical facts. This integrative perspective highlights a previously neglected facet of knowledge updating, namely, recalibration of metric domain knowledge, which can be expected to lead to transfer learning and thus improve estimation for objects from a domain more generally. We develop an experimental paradigm to investigate the association of hindsight bias with improved estimation accuracy. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that the classical approach to induce hindsight bias indeed produces transfer learning. In Experiment 2, we provide evidence for the novel prediction that hindsight bias can be triggered via transfer learning; this establishes a direct link from knowledge updating to hindsight bias. Our work integrates two prominent but previously unconnected research programs on the effects of knowledge updating in real-world estimation and supports the notion that hindsight bias is driven by adaptive learning processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent work suggests that personality moderates the relationship between political ideology and the sharing of misinformation. Specifically, Lawson and Kakkar (2022) claimed that fake news sharing was driven mostly by low conscientiousness conservatives. We reanalyzed their data and conducted five new preregistered conceptual replications to reexamine their claims (N = 2,433; stopping rule determined via Bayesian sequential sampling). The results did not support their claim that conscientious conservatives shared less fake news; instead, their findings pertain to overall sharing rates (of both true and fake news), rather than specifically to fake news. That is, the association between conscientiousness and misinformation sharing (when it occurs) is explained by lower overall sharing instead of a particular resistance to fake news per se. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between overall sharing tendencies and the sharing of misinformation specifically, which have different theoretical and practical implications for how to combat the spread of misinformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

In his commentary, Craik (see record 2023-42323-002) argued that while intentional remembering might be effective for some populations and memory tasks, these are the exception, and that intent will not benefit memory if incidental encoding induces optimal processing. While we agree on many points, we maintain that in most situations the processes induced by the intention to remember are more effective than those induced by deep semantic processing alone. We show that effects of intent appear with a variety of tasks such as free recall, cued recall, source memory, item recognition, in both mixed and pure lists, and when studying individual words, word pairs, or word-image associations. Thus, the beneficial effects of intent generalize over tasks, list-compositions, and study materials. There are also little individual differences in the effect of intent in healthy young adults-most participants (86% out of 336 participants over six experiments) show a beneficial effect. We review evidence that the intent to remember strengthens item-context bindings in episodic memory, but that such effects could be masked and not measurable in subsequent memory tests, unless intrusions are taken into account. We agree that in principle incidental encoding could induce optimal processing, but we do not find the existing evidence convincing. We provide additional novel data that directly addresses Craik's (2023) concerns and we propose ways to further investigate how intention enhances memory. We conclude with a joint statement, coauthored by Craik and ourselves, that synthesizes our converging perspectives and current understanding of the impact of intent on memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Simon, Stroop, and Eriksen flanker tasks are commonly used to assess cognitive control across the lifespan. However, it remains unclear whether these three tasks in fact measure the same cognitive abilities and in the same proportion. We take a developmental approach to this question: if the Simon, Stroop, and flanker tasks all roughly measure the same capacity, they should show similar patterns of age-related change. We present data from two massive online cross-sectional studies: Study 1 included 9,585 native English speakers between 10 and 80 years of age who completed the Simon and Stroop tasks, and Study 2 included 13,448 English speakers between 10 and 79 years of age who completed the flanker task. Of the three tasks, only the flanker task revealed an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory, with performance improving until approximately 23 years of age and declining starting around 40 years of age. Performance on the Simon and Stroop tasks peaked around 34 and 26 years of age, respectively, and did not decline significantly in later life, though it is possible that age-related declines would be observed with more difficult versions of the tasks. Although the Simon and Stroop tasks are commonly interpreted to target similar underlying processes, we observed near zero correlations between the congruency effects observed in each task in terms of both accuracy and response time. We discuss these results in light of recent debates regarding the suitability of these tasks for assessing developmental and individual differences in cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Researchers routinely infer learning and other unobservable psychological functions based on observable behavior. But what behavioral changes constitute evidence of learning? The standard approach is to infer learning based on a single behavior across individuals, including assumptions about the direction and magnitude of change (e.g., everyone should avoid falling repeatedly on a treacherous obstacle). Here we illustrate the benefits of an alternative "multiexpression, relativist, agnostic, individualized" approach. We assessed infant learning from falling based on multiple behaviors relative to each individual's baseline, agnostic about the direction and magnitude of behavioral change. We tested infants longitudinally (10.5-15 months of age) over the transition from crawling to walking. At each session, infants were repeatedly encouraged to crawl or walk over a fall-inducing foam pit interspersed with no-fall baseline trials on a rigid platform. Our approach revealed two learning profiles. Like adults in previous work, "pit-avoid" infants consistently avoided falling. In contrast, "pit-go" infants fell repeatedly across trials and sessions. However, individualized comparisons to baseline across multiple locomotor, exploratory, and social-emotional behaviors showed that pit-go infants also learned at every session. But they treated falling as an unimpactful "pratfall" rather than an aversive "pitfall." Pit-avoid infants displayed enhanced learning across sessions and partial transfer of learning from crawling to walking, whereas pit-go infants displayed neither. Thus, reliance on a predetermined, "one-size-fits-all" behavioral expression of a psychological function can obscure different behavioral profiles and lead to erroneous inferences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Essentialism is the belief that members of particular categories (e.g., social and cultural) are united by an innate underlying essence. While such beliefs have been associated with negative outcomes such as stereotyping, discrimination, and prejudice, minority group members can sometimes use essentialist beliefs to validate their identities. Here, we focus on people who identify as "neurodivergent"-individuals whose brains differ from typical neurology (such as those with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, etc.). We examined whether endorsing essentialist beliefs about neurodivergence serves a protective function among 316 neurodivergent-identifying individuals. As expected, endorsing essentialist beliefs was related to higher self-efficacy. This was especially true of people who highly identified as neurodivergent. These results illuminate how essentialist beliefs may empower a group that is often negatively stereotyped. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

People make fast and reasonable predictions about the physical behavior of everyday objects. To do so, people may use principled mental shortcuts, such as object simplification, similar to models developed by engineers for real-time physical simulations. We hypothesize that people use simplified object approximations for tracking and action (the body representation), as opposed to fine-grained forms for visual recognition (the shape representation). We used three classic psychophysical tasks (causality perception, time-to-collision, and change detection) in novel settings that dissociate body and shape. People's behavior across tasks indicates that they rely on coarse bodies for physical reasoning, which lies between convex hulls and fine-grained shapes. Our empirical and computational findings shed light on basic representations people use to understand everyday dynamics, and how these representations differ from those used for recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).