Applied Cognitive Psychology最新文献

When people estimate the summative carbon footprint of a sequence of events, how are the individual events integrated? In three experiments, we found that summative carbon footprint judgments of item sequences are disproportionately influenced by items at the end of the sequence in comparison with those at the beginning—a recency effect. When, for example, sequences ended with a low carbon footprint item, they were assigned a lower carbon footprint than corresponding sequences with an identical content but different item order. The results also revealed that a green peak (presenting many low carbon footprint items at once) had a relatively large effect on estimates when the peak was contextually distinct from other items in terms of its valence. The results are consistent with an account within which distinctiveness of representations within short-term memory differentially influences decision-making and suggest that memory processes bias the perceived environmental footprint of temporally separated instances.

Eyewitnesses may be exposed to multiple pieces of misinformation concerning the same original detail. The two misleading details contradicting each other enable detecting a discrepancy between them, which, given that only one of them can be true, should reduce credibility of the misinformation source(s) and improve reporting. This, however, can only happen at sufficiently high levels of misinformation availability (i.e., encoding of misinformation and its subsequent accessibility): with low misinformation availability, double misinformation should instead increase the misinformation effect, providing multiple chances of yielding to misinformation. To test these predictions, we experimentally manipulated misinformation availability (high vs. low) and presented double or single misinformation. However, double versus single misinformation presentation did not affect performance or interact with misinformation availability and participants frequently reported misinformation while fully detecting discrepancies between items. Therefore, discrepancy detection alone may not be sufficient in reducing the misinformation effect, with various decision-making processes involved in reporting.

When providing eyewitness testimony, people sometimes fabricate lies that supplement the truth by embellishing or adding new information. This study investigated whether participants confuse their fabricated lies for actually witnessed events over time. In two experiments employing different eyewitness events, participants viewed an event and were then asked to lie about unseen details and events. Memory was assessed after either a 1-week (E1a & E2) or a 4-week (E1b & E2) retention interval. In both experiments, participants falsely reported witnessing their lies after a 4-week retention interval, but only one experiment (E2) obtained evidence for these memory errors at the shorter retention interval of 1-week. In addition, when assessed repeatedly, lies that participants correctly rejected as not witnessed at the 1-week retention interval were later incorrectly endorsed as witnessed when tested again at the 4-week retention interval, thus showing that distinguishing lies from truth became more difficult over time.

Mistaking a person for another sometimes occurs; however, few studies have examined it experimentally. Therefore, the reasons behind this kind of person misidentification and its occurrence rate remain unclear, and thus we aimed to demonstrate person misidentification occurs with a certain probability through a field experiment. We also sought to examine whether the similarity between two people affects the occurrence of person misidentification. When 66 undergraduate participants made a rendezvous with an acquaintance, another person who wore similar clothes to the acquaintance or had a similar face appeared. The results showed that in both the conditions, approximately half of the participants made the person misidentification error, and one-fourth even spoke to the person mistakenly. Moreover, the results indicated that clothing contributed to person misidentification just as much as the face at first sight but became less important over time. This suggests a dynamic shift in person identification depending on time.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the spread of conspiracy theories. Previous research has found that individuals who struggle with emotion regulation are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories. Emotional granularity, or the ability to differentiate between nuanced emotional states, is a key component of effective emotion regulation, yet its relationship with conspiracy beliefs has not been explored thoroughly. Thus, we conducted an experience-sampling study (165 participants, mean age = 26.32 years) including measures of emotion regulation and differentiation. The findings revealed that individuals who endorse conspiracy theories engage in repetitive thinking about the causes and consequences of events and exhibit a reduced ability to distinguish between negative emotions. This effect, however, was observed only in the performance-based measure of emotion differentiation, not in the self-report measures. This suggests that enhancing emotional granularity may help individuals in regulating their emotions more effectively, thereby reducing their vulnerability to adopt conspiracy beliefs.

The relationship between confidence and accuracy and the reliability of eyewitness identifications has attracted a lot of attention. In contrast, relatively little is known about the relationship between eyewitness confidence and the accuracy of recall memory in interview contexts. Here, we manipulated questioning approaches to investigate the impact of Free-Recall and Cued-Recall questions, whereby the latter were witness-compatible (questions concerning details reported in the preceding Free-Recall) or witness-incompatible questions. We also manipulated the order these questions were asked. A sample of 124 mock witness participants watched a crime-video and subsequently recalled the event to understand the impact of question type and order on confidence-accuracy calibration. Our results show that a Free-Recall invitation and compatible (compared to incompatible) questions promoted more stable confidence. Compatible questions yielded fewer errors, more accurate details, and promoted more reliable confidence-accuracy calibration and discrimination, especially when they preceded the incompatible questions. Implications are discussed.

In recent years, the use of calibration analysis and confidence-accuracy characteristic analysis has revealed the confidence-accuracy relationship for positive identification (ID) made from a lineup is often strong. At the same time, the confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections is typically much weaker. Why the relationship is often weak for lineup rejections remains unclear. Here, we report two experiments testing a prediction that follows from signal detection theory. Specifically, this theory predicts that one determinant of the strength of the confidence-accuracy relationship for both positive IDs and lineup rejections is response bias. Theoretically, inducing a more conservative response bias should weaken the confidence-accuracy relationship for positive IDs while strengthening it for lineup rejections. The two experiments reported here support this prediction.

We analyze how curiosity drives news consumption. We test predictions of the information-gap theory of curiosity using over 100,000 WeChat news articles, applying NLP methods to construct measures of salience, importance, and surprisingness associated with news headlines, experimentally validating these measures, and using them to predict clicks. Our findings confirm that people tend to consume news when: the headline sparks a salient question; the content appears more important (e.g., emphasized by the headline's position on the webpage or an exclamation mark); the headline refers to more surprising topics (measured as the KL-divergence from a baseline topic distribution); and the headline has lower valence. Information-gap theory helps predict aggregate news consumption. Yet our data also reveal a small negative correlation between the number of clicks and the ratio of likes to clicks, suggesting that while inducing curiosity can drive short-term news consumption, it doesn't necessarily enhance long-term reader engagement.

Campus sexual assault constitutes a frequent crime witnessed by many. Among co-witnesses such assault is oftentimes denied. We examined how false denials during an informal co-witness conversation impacted memory for the conversation and witnessed assault. Ninety participants watched a trauma-analogue video with a co-witness. The next day, honest control dyads engaged in an honest, informal discussion about the film. In lying dyads one participant falsely denied (internal false denial group) details during this informal discussion with their co-witness (external denial group). One week later, participants' recognition memory for the video and conversation was tested. We did not replicate denial-induced forgetting in that participants who falsely denied did not forget details of the previous conversation, relative to honest participants. Moreover, memory for the film was not statistically significantly affected by our manipulation. Thus, informal false denials might not negatively affect memory, despite previous research showing such effects in formal settings.

360° videos raised the attention of educators, as they can mediate complex environments in educational settings. However, learning irrelevant cognitive strains might be imposed because it is necessary to navigate through spherical material. These downsides could be compensated by using signalling techniques. In a two (macro-level vs. no signalling) × two (micro-level vs. no signalling) factorial between-subjects design plus control group, 203 students watched a video about visual and behavioural characteristics of animals. Learning outcomes, cognitive load, disorientation, and presence were investigated. Results revealed that macro-level signalling enhanced learning outcomes. Descriptively, the control group outperformed all experimental groups except the condition with macro-level signalling regarding retention performance. According to an exploratory path model, extraneous load moderated the effects of signalling on learning outcomes. Results are discussed considering cognitive load and spatial presence induced by using 360° videos as learning material.