Applied Cognitive Psychology最新文献

Investigative interviewers are often required to accurately remember information that has been provided by different people. This can be at the scene of an event or during follow-up investigations in interview rooms. Interviewers must accurately monitor the source of information to differentiate between witnesses' accounts and to assess what information is novel and what has been corroborated by others or by physical evidence. The current research examined the effects of cognitive load on memory and source monitoring accuracy for information provided by multiple witnesses. Participants, under conditions of high cognitive load (HCL) where load was induced via interviewer-relevant tasks (e.g., formulating questions) or no cognitive load (NCL), watched five mock-witnesses' accounts of the same crime. Each witness provided several details of the crime that were unique to their individual account. When asked about account details, and which witness had provided each detail, mock-interviewers' memory accuracy was lower in the HCL condition than the NCL condition. There was no difference between cognitive load conditions for source monitoring accuracy, which was poor regardless of condition.

Prolonged stress and the need for rapid uptake of information can have detrimental effects on memory and cognition, whereas meaningfulness of study material and motivation to learn can have positive effects. How do these opposing conditions impact workplace learning in essential frontline workers during a global pandemic? We analyzed learning data collected longitudinally since before the pandemic in over 85,000 essential frontline grocery workers and nonessential telecommunications workers via a learning management system that incorporates a spaced retrieval schedule, where items are retrieved following retention intervals of varying length. Findings indicate more rapid knowledge uptake in grocery workers (a) during than before the pandemic, (b) for COVID-19-related content than non-COVID content, and (c) in the United States than in Canada. Longer-term maintenance of training material was similar across groups. Evidence of enhanced workplace learning and retention supports efforts to integrate empirically based strategies from the behavioral sciences into learning-based technologies.

People are poor lie detectors, partly because they hold false beliefs about nonverbal cues to deception. Here, we investigated if guiding people to rely only on a message's detailedness (“take-the-best”) boosts their lie detection and to what extent such heuristic judgments are immune to nonverbal information. In three studies (Ns = 109, 88 and 144), participants made detailedness-based veracity judgements, of text versus video statements (Study 1), or of statements without or with biasing nonverbal behavior (truth tellers diverting, liars maintaining gaze; Studies 2 and 3). Compared to unguided judgements, participants using the heuristic method achieved higher deception detection accuracy throughout. Mere access to nonverbal behavior did not deteriorate performance (Study 1), but the heuristic was not fully immune to biasing nonverbal behavior (Studies 2, 3). Our findings challenge the lay notion that access to nonverbal behavior benefits deception detection and suggest that only focusing on diagnostic cues improves lie detection.

Visual comparison is the ability to ‘match’ visual stimuli like fingerprints or faces and decide whether they are from the same source or different sources (e.g., fingerprint-matching). Limited research has investigated individual differences in this ability. In this paper, we present the results of three studies that explore the generalisability and stability of five visual comparison tasks (fingerprints, faces, artificial-prints, footwear and toolmarks). We report data from three new studies examining the generalisability and stability of footwear comparison (Exp. 1) and toolmark comparison (Exp. 2), as well as the generalisability of all five comparison tasks (Exp. 3). Our results reveal that visual comparison ability generalises across all five comparison tasks and has stable test–retest reliability over time.

Realistic visualizations have been found to enhance the learning of object shapes, but regarding the learning of processes, the effects of realism are largely unclear. Previous findings indicate that realism can induce a higher level of extraneous cognitive load compared with schematics and that details are attention-consuming. The present experiment was conducted to assess the effects of realism on learning about a process with combinations of texts and pictures. It was hypothesized that realism would be a hindrance in engaging with texts due to the potential for distraction exerted by details. Students either learned with a schematic or a realistic version of a life-cycle diagram accompanied by texts. Realism increased participants' extraneous cognitive load, while there were no significant differences regarding retention performance. The results confirm previous results that realism can increase subjective extraneous cognitive load, but highlight that realism may not prevent learners from understanding textual information.