Cognition最新文献

Why were women given the right to vote? “Because it is morally wrong to deny women the right to vote.” This explanation does not seem to fit the typical pattern for explaining an event: rather than citing a cause, it appeals to an ethical claim. Do people judge ethical claims to be genuinely explanatory? And if so, why? In Studies 1 (N = 220) and 2 (N = 293), we find that many participants accept ethical explanations for social change and that this is predicted by their meta-ethical beliefs in moral progress and moral principles, suggesting that these participants treat morality as a directional feature of the world, somewhat akin to a causal force. In Studies 3 (N = 513) and 4 (N = 328), we find that participants recognize this relationship between ethical explanations and meta-ethical commitments, using the former to make inferences about individuals' beliefs in moral progress and moral principles. Together these studies demonstrate that our beliefs about the nature of morality shape our judgments of explanations and that explanations shape our inferences about others' moral commitments.

The human capacity to imagine possible future events unintentionally, with minimal cognitive effort, is termed spontaneous future thought (SFT). This paper addresses an important theoretical question for cognitive science: What are the possible cognitive mechanisms underlying such SFT experiences? We contrasted three hypotheses present in the literature: the online construction hypothesis, the recasting hypothesis, and the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. Study 1 (N = 41) used novel subjective ratings which challenged the recasting mechanism: SFTs were mostly rated as dissimilar to autobiographical memories, suggesting they are not simply past experiences ‘recast’ as future events. Study 2 (N = 90) used a novel experimental paradigm, comparing effects of voluntary episodic future constructions and non-personal narratives upon subsequent spontaneous thought sampling. Results suggested that voluntary future constructions remain accessible to spontaneous retrieval, supporting the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. This finding, and other data presented across the two studies, still indicates a role for online construction processes in SFT, but further empirical work is needed to clarify how and when constructive processes are engaged in SFT. Taken together, these two studies represent initial efforts to elucidate the mechanisms underlying SFT, providing the first proof-of-principle that deliberately envisioned future events can reappear, without intention, in consciousness at some later time, and further supporting the dual process account of future thinking. These methods and findings provide a firm basis for subsequent experimental and longitudinal research on SFT.

Research on individual differences in face recognition has provided important foundational insights: their broad range, cognitive specificity, strong heritability, and resilience to change. Elusive, however, has been the key issue of practical relevance: do these individual differences correlate with aspects of life that go beyond the recognition of faces, per se? Though often assumed, especially in social realms, such correlates remain largely theoretical, without empirical support. Here, we investigate an array of potential social correlates of face recognition. We establish social relationship quality as a reproducible correlate. This link generalises across face recognition tasks and across independent samples. In contrast, we detect no robust association with the sheer quantity of social connections, whether measured directly via number of social contacts or indirectly via extraversion-related personality indices. These findings document the existence of a key social correlate of face recognition and provide some of the first evidence to support its practical relevance. At the same time, they challenge the naive assumption that face recognition relates equally to all social outcomes. In contrast, they suggest a focused link of face recognition to the quality, not quantity, of one's social connections.

Rules help guide our behavior—particularly in complex social contexts. But rules sometimes give us the “wrong” answer. How do we know when it is okay to break the rules? In this paper, we argue that we sometimes use contractualist (agreement-based) mechanisms to determine when a rule can be broken. Our model draws on a theory of social interactions – “virtual bargaining” – that assumes that actors engage in a simulated bargaining process when navigating the social world. We present experimental data which suggests that rule-breaking decisions are sometimes driven by virtual bargaining and show that these data cannot be explained by more traditional rule-based or outcome-based approaches.

Previous research has reported diverging patterns of results with respect to discriminability and response bias when comparing the simultaneous lineup to two different lineup procedures in which items are presented sequentially, the sequential stopping rule lineup and the UK lineup. In a single large sample experiment, we compared discriminability and response bias in six-item photographic lineups presented either simultaneously, sequentially with a stopping rule, or sequentially requiring two full laps through the items before making an identification and including the ability to revisit items, analogous to the UK lineup procedure. Discriminability was greater for the simultaneous lineup compared to the sequential stopping rule lineup, despite a non-significant difference in empirical discriminability between the procedures. There was no significant difference in discriminability when comparing the simultaneous lineup to the sequential two lineup and the sequential two lap lineup to the sequential stopping rule lineup. Responding was most lenient for the sequential two lap lineup, followed by the simultaneous lineup, followed by the sequential lineup. These results imply that sequential item presentation may not exert a large effect in isolation on discriminability and response bias. Rather, discriminability and response bias in the sequential stopping rule lineup and UK lineup result from the interaction of sequential item presentation with other aspects of these procedures.

It is often claimed that probabilistic expectations affect visual perception directly, without mediation by selective attention. However, these claims have been disputed, as effects of expectation and attention are notoriously hard to dissociate experimentally. In this study, we used a new approach to separate expectations from attention. In four experiments (N = 60), participants searched for a target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream and had to identify a digit or a letter defined by a low-level cue (colour or shape). Expectations about the target's alphanumeric category were probabilistically manipulated. Since category membership is a high-level feature and since the target was embedded among many distractors that shared its category, targets from the expected category should not attract attention more than targets from the unexpected category. In the first experiment, these targets were more likely to be identified relative to targets from the unexpected category. Importantly, in the following experiments, we also included behavioural and electrophysiological indices of attentional guidance and engagement. This allowed us to examine whether expectations also modulated these or earlier attentional processes. Results showed that category-based expectations had no modulatory effects on attention, and only affected processing at later encoding-related stages. Alternative interpretation of expectation effects in terms of repetition priming or response bias were also ruled out. These observations provide new evidence for direct attention-independent expectation effects on perception. We suggest that expectations can adjust the threshold required for encoding expectations-congruent information, thereby affecting the speed with which target objects are encoded in working memory.

Psychological variability (i.e., “noise”) displays interesting structure which is hidden by the common practice of averaging over trials. Interesting noise structure, termed ‘stylized facts’, is observed in financial markets (i.e., behaviors from many thousands of traders). Here we investigate the parallels between psychological and financial time series. In a series of three experiments (total N = 202), we successively simplified a market-based price prediction task by first removing external information, and then removing any interaction between participants. Finally, we removed any resemblance to an asset market by asking individual participants to simply reproduce temporal intervals. All three experiments reproduced the main stylized facts found in financial markets, and the robustness of the results suggests that a common cognitive-level mechanism can produce them. We identify one potential model based on mental sampling algorithms, showing how this general-purpose model might account for behavior across these very different tasks.

Narrative episodic memory of movie clips can be retroactively impaired by presenting unrelated stimuli coinciding with event boundaries. This effect has been linked with rapid hippocampal processes triggered by the offset of the event, that are alternatively related either to memory consolidation or with working memory processes. Here we tested whether this effect extended to spatial memory, the temporal specificity and extent of the interference, and its effect on working- vs long-term memory. In three computerized adaptations of the Morris Water Maze, participants learned the location of an invisible target over three trials each. A second spatial navigation task was presented either immediately after finding the target, after a 10-s delay, or no second task was presented (control condition). A recall session, in which participants indicated the learned target location with 10 ‘pin-drop’ trials for each condition, was performed after a 1-h or a 24-h break. Spatial memory was measured by the mean distance between pins and the true location. Results indicated that the immediate presentation of the second task led to worse memory performance, for both break durations, compared to the delayed condition. There was no difference in performance between the delayed presentation and the control condition. Despite this long-term memory effect, we found no difference in the rate of performance improvement during the learning session, indicating no effect of the second task on working memory. Our findings are in line with a rapid process, linked to the offset of an event, that is involved in the early stages of memory consolidation.

Objectively quantifying subjective phenomena like visual illusions is challenging. We address this issue in the context of the Flashed Face Distortion Effect (FFDE), where faces presented in succession appear distorted and grotesque. We first show that the traditional method of quantifying FFDE – via subjective ratings of the level of distortion – is subject to substantial biases. Motivated by this finding, we develop an objective method for quantifying FFDE by introducing two design innovations. First, we create artificially distorted faces and ask subjects to discriminate between undistorted and objectively distorted faces. Second, we employ both an illusion condition, which includes a succession of 15 face flashes, and a control condition, which includes a single face flash and does not induce an illusion. Using these innovations, we quantify the strength of the face distortion illusion by comparing the response bias for identifying distorted faces between the illusion and control conditions. We find that our method successfully quantifies the face distortion, with subjects exhibiting a more liberal response bias in the illusion condition. Finally, we apply our new method to evaluate how the face distortion illusion is modulated by face eccentricity, face inversion, the temporal frequency of the face flashes, and presence of temporal gaps between consecutive faces. Our results demonstrate the utility of our objective method in quantifying the subjective illusion of face distortion. Critically, the method is general and can be applied to other phenomena that are inherently subjective.

Individuals exhibit limited awareness of when their attention is captured by salient but irrelevant stimuli, and it has long been argued that involuntary attentional capture by such stimuli is minimally disruptive to information processing. Yet, robust mechanisms of distractor suppression are hypothesized to support the control of attention, which presumably serve in the interest of managing distraction. In the present study, I examine whether participants are aware of the cost of distraction with respect to task performance, and whether they are motivated to manage this cost even when it is effortful to do so. Across three experiments, participants were willing to exert physical effort in order to reduce the frequency with which they encountered physically salient distractors, and in a fourth experiment tended to prefer trials with fewer distractors when given a choice over distractor frequency. Importantly, the amount of physical effort exerted varied as a function of the degree to which task-irrelevant distractors impaired search performance, suggesting that people are sensitive to the cost of distraction.