Sensemaking
Action video game play facilitates the development of better perceptual templates
Vikranth Bejjanki et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The field of perceptual learning has identified changes in perceptual templates as a powerful mechanism mediating the learning of statistical regularities in our environment. By measuring threshold-vs.-contrast curves using an orientation identification task under varying levels of external noise, the perceptual template model (PTM) allows one to disentangle various sources of signal-to-noise changes that can alter performance. We use the PTM approach to elucidate the mechanism that underlies the wide range of improvements noted after action video game play. We show that action video game players make use of improved perceptual templates compared with nonvideo game players, and we confirm a causal role for action video game play in inducing such improvements through a 50-h training study. Then, by adapting a recent neural model to this task, we demonstrate how such improved perceptual templates can arise from reweighting the connectivity between visual areas. Finally, we establish that action gamers do not enter the perceptual task with improved perceptual templates. Instead, although performance in action gamers is initially indistinguishable from that of nongamers, action gamers more rapidly learn the proper template as they experience the task. Taken together, our results establish for the first time to our knowledge the development of enhanced perceptual templates following action game play. Because such an improvement can facilitate the inference of the proper generative model for the task at hand, unlike perceptual learning that is quite specific, it thus elucidates a general learning mechanism that can account for the various behavioral benefits noted after action game play.
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Blind Insight: Metacognitive Discrimination Despite Chance Task Performance
Ryan Scott et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Blindsight and other examples of unconscious knowledge and perception demonstrate dissociations between judgment accuracy and metacognition: Studies reveal that participants’ judgment accuracy can be above chance while their confidence ratings fail to discriminate right from wrong answers. Here, we demonstrated the opposite dissociation: a reliable relationship between confidence and judgment accuracy (demonstrating metacognition) despite judgment accuracy being no better than chance. We evaluated the judgments of 450 participants who completed an AGL task. For each trial, participants decided whether a stimulus conformed to a given set of rules and rated their confidence in that judgment. We identified participants who performed at chance on the discrimination task, utilizing a subset of their responses, and then assessed the accuracy and the confidence-accuracy relationship of their remaining responses. Analyses revealed above-chance metacognition among participants who did not exhibit decision accuracy. This important new phenomenon, which we term blind insight, poses critical challenges to prevailing models of metacognition grounded in signal detection theory.
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The Floor Is Nearer Than the Sky: How Looking Up or Down Affects Construal Level
Anneleen Van Kerckhove, Maggie Geuens & Iris Vermeir
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research shows that consumers select a different product when they look down versus up. Because (1) people are accustomed to looking down to process nearby stimuli and to looking up to process distant stimuli, and because (2) perceived distance is linked to concrete versus abstract processing, the association between moving one’s eyes or head down or up and concrete versus abstract processing has become overgeneralized. A series of three experiments highlights that downward (upward) head and eye movements evoke more concrete (abstract) processing because downward (upward) head or eye movements have come to serve as a proximity (distance) cue. Two additional experiments indicate downstream behavioral consequences of moving one’s eyes or head down versus up. Consumers choose more for feasible versus desirable products when looking down and vice versa when looking up. They also tend to be more preference consistent when looking down versus up.
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Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants
Sarah Jessen & Tobias Grossmann
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 November 2014, Pages 16208–16213
Abstract:
Human eyes serve two key functions in face-to-face social interactions: they provide cues about a person’s emotional state and attentional focus (gaze direction). Both functions critically rely on the morphologically unique human sclera and have been shown to operate even in the absence of conscious awareness in adults. However, it is not known whether the ability to respond to social cues from scleral information without conscious awareness exists early in human ontogeny and can therefore be considered a foundational feature of human social functioning. In the current study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to show that 7-mo-old infants discriminate between fearful and nonfearful eyes (experiment 1) and between direct and averted gaze (experiment 2), even when presented below the perceptual threshold. These effects were specific to the human sclera and not seen in response to polarity-inverted eyes. Our results suggest that early in ontogeny the human brain detects social cues from scleral information even in the absence of conscious awareness. The current findings support the view that the human eye with its prominent sclera serves critical communicative functions during human social interactions.
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Hunger moderates the activation of psychological disease avoidance mechanisms
Sarah Ainsworth & Jon Maner
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, October 2014, Pages 303-313
Abstract:
Humans evolved to possess psychological mechanisms that help them avoid coming into contact with infectious diseases. Those mechanisms promote vigilance to and avoidance of disease cues, including heuristic cues displayed by other people (e.g., old age, obesity). The current research demonstrated that hunger — a state that sensitizes people to the presence of foodborne pathogens — moderated the activation of psychological disease avoidance mechanisms. In 2 experiments, hunger moderated the effect of pathogen priming on responses to social disease cues. A pathogen prime led participants who were subjectively hungry (Experiment 1) and who had abstained from eating for 5 hr (Experiment 2) to display heightened disease avoidance responses, including increases in overt prejudice (Experiment 1) and biases toward categorizing targets into groups heuristically associated with disease (the obese and the elderly). These findings highlight the functional interplay between psychological and physiological processes in helping people avoid disease. Findings also have implications for identifying subtle sources of social prejudice.
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Hearing a statement now and believing the opposite later
Teresa Garcia-Marques et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 126–129
Abstract:
Existing findings on the truth effect could be explained by recollection of the statements presented in the exposure phase. In order to examine a pure fluency account of this effect, we tested a unique prediction that could not be derived from recollection of a statement. In one experiment, participants judged the truth of a statement that had the same surface appearance as a statement presented earlier but contradicted it, for example “crocodiles sleep with their eyes open” one week after having heard “crocodiles sleep with their eyes closed”. We predicted and found that participants judged contradictory statements as being more false than new statements after a delay of only a few minutes, but judged them as more likely to be true after one week. In contrast to earlier findings, this result cannot be explained by accounts relying on recollection of the previously presented statements.
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Always Gamble on an Empty Stomach: Hunger Is Associated with Advantageous Decision Making
Denise de Ridder et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2014
Abstract:
Three experimental studies examined the counterintuitive hypothesis that hunger improves strategic decision making, arguing that people in a hot state are better able to make favorable decisions involving uncertain outcomes. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants with more hunger or greater appetite made more advantageous choices in the Iowa Gambling Task compared to sated participants or participants with a smaller appetite. Study 3 revealed that hungry participants were better able to appreciate future big rewards in a delay discounting task; and that, in spite of their perception of increased rewarding value of both food and monetary objects, hungry participants were not more inclined to take risks to get the object of their desire. Together, these studies for the first time provide evidence that hot states improve decision making under uncertain conditions, challenging the conventional conception of the detrimental role of impulsivity in decision making.
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The Cool Scent of Power: Effects of Ambient Scent on Consumer Preferences and Choice Behavior
Adriana Madzharov, Lauren Block & Maureen Morrin
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research examines how ambient scents impact spatial perceptions in retail environments, which in turn influence customers' feelings of power and thus product preference and purchasing behavior. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that in a warm- (versus cool-) scented and thus perceptually more (versus less) socially dense environment, people experience a greater (versus lesser) need for power, which manifests in increased preference for and purchase of premium products and brands. This research extends knowledge on store atmospherics and customer experience management through the effects of ambient scent on spatial perceptions, and builds on recent research on power in choice contexts.
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Unconscious information changes decision accuracy but not confidence
Alexandra Vlassova, Chris Donkin & Joel Pearson
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 November 2014, Pages 16214–16218
Abstract:
The controversial idea that information can be processed and evaluated unconsciously to change behavior has had a particularly impactful history. Here, we extend a simple model of conscious decision-making to explain both conscious and unconscious accumulation of decisional evidence. Using a novel dichoptic suppression paradigm to titrate conscious and unconscious evidence, we show that unconscious information can be accumulated over time and integrated with conscious elements presented either before or after to boost or diminish decision accuracy. The unconscious information could only be used when some conscious decision-relevant information was also present. These data are fit well by a simple diffusion model in which the rate and variability of evidence accumulation is reduced but not eliminated by the removal of conscious awareness. Surprisingly, the unconscious boost in accuracy was not accompanied by corresponding increases in confidence, suggesting that we have poor metacognition for unconscious decisional evidence.
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Competitive Interaction Leads to Perceptual Distancing Between Actors
Laura Thomas, Christopher Davoli & James Brockmole
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
People physically distance themselves from competitors and the disliked, and cooperate less with those who are further away. We examine whether social interaction can also impact the space people perceive between themselves and others by measuring the influence of competitive dynamics on visual perception. In 2 experiments, participants played a ball toss game until they reached a target score. In Experiment 1, a confederate stood across the room from the participant and either (a) played the same game competitively, (b) played the same game cooperatively, or (c) observed the participant without playing, while in Experiment 2, 2 participants played the same versions of the game with each other. After the game, participants provided an estimate of the distance between themselves and the other player. Participants in Experiment 1 who competed with the confederate consistently judged her to be more distant than participants who cooperated with the confederate or played alone. In Experiment 2, players who lost the competition perceived more distance between themselves and their opponents than did players who won, suggesting that the experience of losing a competition drives this perceptual distancing. These findings demonstrate the power of a socially distancing interaction to create perceptual distance between people.
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Violent and Sexual Media Impair Second-Language Memory during Encoding and Retrieval
Robert Lull, Yakup Çetin & Brad Bushman
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 172–178
Abstract:
Research suggests that exposure to media containing violence and sex impairs attention and memory. Learning a foreign language is one domain in which attention and memory are critical. Two experiments addressed whether exposure to media containing violence and sex interferes with foreign-language performance. Turkish participants (NExperiment 1 = 70, NExperiment 2 = 76) completed a foreign-language performance task before and after viewing a video. By random assignment, participants watched either a video containing violence and sex or a video containing no violence or sex. In both experiments, the two groups did not differ on pretest performance, but participants exposed to violence and sex performed worse on the posttest (Experiment 1: English; Experiment 2: Spanish), and on a delayed test one-week later (Experiment 2). These results suggest that participants exposed to violence and sex allocated attentional resources to violent and sexual cues in their videos rather than to the foreign language material.
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Embodied effects are moderated by situational cues: Warmth, threat, and the desire for affiliation
Adam Fay & Jon Maner
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research demonstrates fundamental links between low-level bodily states and higher order psychological processes. How those links interact with the surrounding social context, however, is not well-understood. Findings from two experiments indicate that the psychological link between physical warmth and social affiliation depends on the situation in which the warmth is experienced. Participants who had been primed with physical threat (as compared with control conditions) responded to warmth with stronger increases in affiliative motivation. This effect replicated across different threat and warmth primes. These findings support a view in which physical sensations interact dynamically with aspects of the immediate situation to influence the activation and application of higher order social processes. This view implies that many embodied psychological processes could function to help people respond adaptively to situational threats and opportunities.