Cognition最新文献

As social beings, we excel at understanding what other people think or believe. We even seem to be influenced by the belief of others in situations where it is irrelevant to our current tasks. Such altercentric interference has been proposed to reflect implicit belief processing. However, in which situations altercentric interference occurs and to what extent it is automatic or dependent on the relevance of the belief in context are open questions. To investigate this, we developed a novel task testing whether participants show an altercentric bias when searching for an object in a continuous search space (a 'sandbox'). Critically, another agent is present that holds either a true or a false belief about the object location, depending on condition. We predicted that participants' search for the object would deviate from its actual location in direction of where the agent believed the object to be. Further, we tested how this altercentric bias would interact with an explicit belief reasoning version of the task, where participants are asked where the agent would look for the object. In two large, preregistered studies (N = 113 and N = 157), we found evidence for an altercentric bias in participants' object search. Importantly, this bias was only present in participants who conducted the explicit before the implicit task and started the experiment with the false belief condition. These findings indicate that altercentric biases depend on the relevance of the other's belief in the context of the task, suggesting that spontaneous belief processing is not automatic but context dependent.

The present research examines the factors that contribute to a negative bias in how Americans imagine the future of their country. Specifically, we tested the effects of perceived country well-being, national identity (Study 1), and news coverage (Study 2) on Americans' collective future thinking. Study 1 was situated in a cross-cultural context, in which US and Chinese participants listed within 1 min as many exciting or worrying events as they could that might happen in their country's future and reported perceived country well-being and national identity. In Study 2, US participants read positive, negative, or neutral news events happening in their country and then imagined what might happen in their country's near and distant futures. Americans imagined more negative relative to positive events and rated positive events less positively and negative events more negatively than did Chinese, with the cultural differences explained by the lower perceived country well-being among Americans. US participants exposed to negative news showed greater negative bias in their collective future thoughts than those exposed to neutral or positive news, and the effect was explained by the lower perceived country well-being in the negative news condition. These findings underscore the complexity of collective future perceptions and the significance of psychological and societal factors in shaping how people foresee their country's future.

Moral dilemmas often involve a conflict between action-options that maximize outcomes for the greater good (utilitarianism) and inaction-options that conform to moral norms (deontology). Previous research suggests that, compared to individuals, groups show stronger support for outcome-maximizing actions that violate moral norms. The current study used a computational modeling approach to investigate whether this difference is driven by (1) stronger sensitivity to consequences, (2) weaker sensitivity to moral norms, or (3) weaker action aversion in moral-dilemma judgments made by groups. The results suggest that groups show a stronger sensitivity to consequences than individuals. Groups and individuals did not differ in terms of their sensitivity to moral norms and their general action aversion. The findings challenge the idea that groups are less action averse and less concerned about violating moral norms than individuals and instead suggest that group decisions are more strongly guided by outcomes for the greater good.

This study aimed to assess the roles of part-based and holistic processing for face processing ability (FPA). A psychophysical paradigm in which the efficiency at recognizing isolated or combined facial parts was used (N = 64), and holistic processing was defined as the perceptual integration from multiple parts. FPA and object processing ability were measured using a battery of tasks. A multiple linear regression including three predictors, namely perceptual integration, part-based efficiency, and object processing, explained 40 % of the variance in FPA. Most importantly, our results reveal a strong predictive relationship between part-based efficiency and FPA, a small predictive relationship between object processing ability and FPA, and no predictive relationship between perceptual integration and FPA. This result was obtained despite considerable variance in perceptual integration skills-with some participants exhibiting a highly efficient integration. These results indicate that part-based processing plays a pivotal role in FPA, whereas holistic processing does not.

For some people the experience of visual imagery is lacking, a condition recently referred to as aphantasia. So far, most of the studies on aphantasia rely on subjective reports, leaving the question of whether mental images can exist without reaching consciousness unresolved. In the present study, the formation of mental images was estimated in individuals with aphantasia without explicitly asking them to generate mental images. 151 Participants performed an implicit priming task where a probe is assumed to automatically reactivate a mental image. An explicit priming task, where participants were explicitly required to form a mental image after a probe, served as a control task. While control participants showed a priming effect in both the implicit and explicit tasks, aphantasics did not show any priming effects. These results suggest that aphantasia relies on a genuine inability to generate mental images rather than on a deficit in accessing these images consciously. Our priming paradigm might be a promising tool for characterizing mental images without relying on participant introspection.

Inhibitory control is classically considered a domain-general process, yet recent findings suggest it may operate in context-specific ways. This has important implications for theories in other cognitive domains, such as mathematics, in which inhibitory control is proposed to play a key role. Inhibitory control has been implicated in resolving interference between competing number facts when retrieving them from memory, yet clear evidence for this is lacking. Here we report two pre-registered experiments with adults that investigated transfer of inhibitory control between interleaved Stroop and multiplication fact retrieval trials. Experiment 1 (n = 450) measured the congruency sequence effect, where transfer of inhibitory control between trials leads to a reduced congruency effect following an incongruent trial. Experiment 2 (n = 370) measured transfer of the list-wide proportion congruency effect, where the congruency effect is reduced when incongruent trials are more frequent. We found evidence of transfer of the congruency sequence effect between Stroop and multiplication. This did not differ depending on whether the Stroop task used number or animal stimuli. There was no transfer of the list-wide proportion congruency effect. These results suggest that reactive, transient domain-general inhibitory control processes are involved in retrieving multiplication facts from memory. Our findings have implications for theories of cognitive control and mathematical cognition, but caution should be taken in interpreting implications for educational interventions.

People given written descriptions often learn and decide differently from those learning from experience, even in formally identical tasks. This paper presents two experiments detailing how telling participants about the value of one stimulus impacts a keystone learning effect - blocking. The paper investigates if descriptions can be used to effectively block future trial-by-trial learning. Participants were presented with coloured shape stimuli and asked if those shapes caused reward. Experiment 1 found both standard, trial-by-trial experienced blocking and the novel effect of described blocking of future trial-by-trial learning. Experiment 2 investigated the conditions that promote described blocking by manipulating the training that occurred prior to exposure to the description. In the Pre-training Present group, participants exposed to a training set of compound and elemental stimuli produced more pronounced blocking than the Pre-training Absent group, which had no such training. These results show that explicit descriptions about causal relations can block learning from subsequent experience, providing a new extension of associative learning toward the verbal domain.

How do we infer the beliefs of an entire group (e.g., Democrats) after being exposed to the beliefs of only a handful of group members? What if we know that the beliefs we encountered were selected in a biased manner? Across two experiments, we recruited 640 U.S. residents and assessed whether they could recognize and correct for such sample bias. Some participants viewed biased samples that exclusively featured the political opinions of extreme partisans, while others viewed representative samples free from selection biases. Results suggest that people do attempt to correct for known sample bias, but their efforts are often insufficient, leading them to make inaccurate inferences that align with sample bias. Specifically, participants tended to overestimate the ideological extremity of both Democrats and Republicans to a greater extent when exposed to explicitly biased samples, as opposed to representative ones. They also perceived members of the political party in question as holding more homogenous views, presumably because samples of extreme party members' views tend to have less variability than representative samples. Perhaps as a consequence, participants exposed to what they knew to be a biased sample, and who subsequently gave more biased estimates, did not express lower confidence in their estimates compared to participants who were shown representative samples. We discuss how a tendency to insufficiently adjust for transparently biased samples may contribute to partisan misperceptions that fuel political polarization.

Most people can imagine images that they experience within their mind's eye. However, there are marked individual differences, with some people reporting that they are unable to visualise (aphantasics), and others who report having imagined experiences that are as realistic as seeing (hyper-phantasics). The vividness of imagery is most often measured via subjective self-report. Chang and Pearson (2018), however, have suggested that a binocular rivalry (BR) protocol can be used as an objective measure. They found that pre-imagining a moving input could enhance performance on an objective probe detection task when probes are embedded in imagery consistent inputs, as opposed to imagery inconsistent inputs. To date, nobody has assessed if this type of objective imagery priming can be used to predict the vividness of different people's visualisations. Here, we report that imagery priming of objective sensitivity to probes within static BR inputs does not correlate with the ratings people use to describe the vividness of their visualisations (a between participants effect). However, objective priming of sensitivity to probes embedded in BR inputs was greater on trials when participants reported that their pre-imagined experience had been more vivid than average (a within participants effect). Overall, our data suggest that while imagery can prime objective sensitivity to probes during BR, there is currently no strong evidence that this effect can be used as a reliable objective method to predict the subjective vividness of different people's visualisations.

The ability to represent and infer accurately others' mental states, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), has been theorised to be associated with metacognitive ability. Here, we considered the role of metacognition in mental state inference through the lens of a recent theoretical approach to explaining ToM, the 'Mind-space' framework. The Mind-space framework posits that trait inference, representation of the qualities of the mind giving rise to the mental state, is important in forming accurate mental state inferences. We tested a potential role for metacognition in facilitating optimal weighting of trait inferences, as well as several theoretical predictions regarding factors associated with the accuracy of trait inference and confidence in those trait inferences. Participants completed a judgement-of-confidence task in the trait inference domain alongside the Interview Task, a recently-developed task for assessing the accuracy of trait and mental state inferences. A simple relationship in which increased metacognitive sensitivity is associated with increased accuracy of mental states inferences was not found. However, when predicting trial-level performance, confidence in trait inference was shown to modulate the effect of trait inference accuracy on mental state inference accuracy. This effect was greater in magnitude with lower metacognitive sensitivity, i.e., when confidence is more likely to be misplaced. Furthermore, participants' trait inference ability was associated with the accuracy of their understanding of the average mind. In addition, the accuracy of specific trait inferences was predicted by the participant's similarity to the target, but this similarity benefit was reduced in participants whose self-perception was inaccurate. Reported confidence in a given trait inference was also predicted by participant-target similarity, such that participants showed greater overconfidence in judgements made about similar targets. This overconfidence effect was larger when self-perception was more erroneous. Results support several theoretical claims made by the Mind-space theory, and further elucidate the processes underlying accurate mental state inference.