The Perception of History: Seeing Causal History in Static Shapes Induces Illusory Motion Perception
The perception of shape, it has been argued, also often entails the perception of time. A cookie missing a bite, for example, is seen as a whole cookie that was subsequently bitten. It has never been clear, however, whether such observations truly reflect visual processing. To explore this possibility, we tested whether the perception of history in static shapes could actually induce illusory motion perception. Observers watched a square change to a truncated form, with a "piece" of it missing, and they reported whether this change was sudden or gradual. When the contours of the missing piece suggested a type of historical...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Chen, Y.-C., Scholl, B. J. Tags: Research Report Source Type: research
A Simple Task Uncovers a Postdictive Illusion of Choice
Do people know when, or whether, they have made a conscious choice? Here, we explore the possibility that choices can seem to occur before they are actually made. In two studies, participants were asked to quickly choose from a set of options before a randomly selected option was made salient. Even when they believed that they had made their decision prior to this event, participants were significantly more likely than chance to report choosing the salient option when this option was made salient soon after the perceived time of choice. Thus, without participants’ awareness, a seemingly later event influenced choices...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bear, A., Bloom, P. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Neural Representations of Physics Concepts
We used functional MRI (fMRI) to assess neural representations of physics concepts (momentum, energy, etc.) in juniors, seniors, and graduate students majoring in physics or engineering. Our goal was to identify the underlying neural dimensions of these representations. Using factor analysis to reduce the number of dimensions of activation, we obtained four physics-related factors that were mapped to sets of voxels. The four factors were interpretable as causal motion visualization, periodicity, algebraic form, and energy flow. The individual concepts were identifiable from their fMRI signatures with a mean rank accuracy o...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mason, R. A., Just, M. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
More Similar but Less Satisfying: Comparing Preferences for and the Efficacy of Within- and Cross-Category Substitutes for Food
When people cannot get what they want, they often satisfy their desire by consuming a substitute. Substitutes can originate from within the taxonomic category of the desired stimulus (i.e., within-category substitutes) or from a different taxonomic category that serves the same basic goal (i.e., cross-category substitutes). Both a store-brand chocolate (within-category substitute) and a granola bar (cross-category substitute), for example, can serve as substitutes for gourmet chocolate. Here, we found that people believe that within-category substitutes, which are more similar to desired stimuli, will more effectively sati...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Huh, Y. E., Vosgerau, J., Morewedge, C. K. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Vagal Tone and Childrens Delay of Gratification: Differential Sensitivity in Resource-Poor and Resource-Rich Environments
Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds have differing abilities to delay gratification, and impoverished children have the greatest difficulties in doing so. In the present study, we examined the role of vagal tone in predicting the ability to delay gratification in both resource-rich and resource-poor environments. We derived hypotheses from evolutionary models of children’s conditional adaptation to proximal rearing contexts. In Study 1, we tested whether elevated vagal tone was associated with shorter delay of gratification in impoverished children. In Study 2, we compared the relative role of vagal ton...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sturge-Apple, M. L., Suor, J. H., Davies, P. T., Cicchetti, D., Skibo, M. A., Rogosch, F. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Searching for Category-Consistent Features: A Computational Approach to Understanding Visual Category Representation
This article introduces a generative model of category representation that uses computer vision methods to extract category-consistent features (CCFs) directly from images of category exemplars. The model was trained on 4,800 images of common objects, and CCFs were obtained for 68 categories spanning subordinate, basic, and superordinate levels in a category hierarchy. When participants searched for these same categories, targets cued at the subordinate level were preferentially fixated, but fixated targets were verified faster when they followed a basic-level cue. The subordinate-level advantage in guidance is explained b...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Yu, C.-P., Maxfield, J. T., Zelinsky, G. J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
What Predicts Childrens Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets? Not Their Parents Views of Intelligence but Their Parents Views of Failure
Children’s intelligence mind-sets (i.e., their beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable) robustly influence their motivation and learning. Yet, surprisingly, research has not linked parents’ intelligence mind-sets to their children’s. We tested the hypothesis that a different belief of parents—their failure mind-sets—may be more visible to children and therefore more prominent in shaping their beliefs. In Study 1, we found that parents can view failure as debilitating or enhancing, and that these failure mind-sets predict parenting practices and, in turn, children’s intel...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Haimovitz, K., Dweck, C. S. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
From Creatures of Habit to Goal-Directed Learners: Tracking the Developmental Emergence of Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
In this study, children, adolescents, and adults performed a sequential reinforcement-learning task that enabled estimation of model-based and model-free contributions to choice. Whereas a model-free strategy was apparent in choice behavior across all age groups, a model-based strategy was absent in children, became evident in adolescents, and strengthened in adults. These results suggest that recruitment of model-based valuation systems represents a critical cognitive component underlying the gradual maturation of goal-directed behavior. (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Decker, J. H., Otto, A. R., Daw, N. D., Hartley, C. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Capturing the Interpersonal Implications of Evolved Preferences? Frequency of Sex Shapes Automatic, but Not Explicit, Partner Evaluations
A strong predisposition to engage in sexual intercourse likely evolved in humans because sex is crucial to reproduction. Given that meeting interpersonal preferences tends to promote positive relationship evaluations, sex within a relationship should be positively associated with relationship satisfaction. Nevertheless, prior research has been inconclusive in demonstrating such a link, with longitudinal and experimental studies showing no association between sexual frequency and relationship satisfaction. Crucially, though, all prior research has utilized explicit reports of satisfaction, which reflect deliberative process...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hicks, L. L., McNulty, J. K., Meltzer, A. L., Olson, M. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Early-Childhood Social Reticence Predicts Brain Function in Preadolescent Youths During Distinct Forms of Peer Evaluation
Social reticence is expressed as shy, anxiously avoidant behavior in early childhood. With development, overt signs of social reticence may diminish but could still manifest themselves in neural responses to peers. We obtained measures of social reticence across 2 to 7 years of age. At age 11, preadolescents previously characterized as high (n = 30) or low (n = 23) in social reticence completed a novel functional-MRI-based peer-interaction task that quantifies neural responses to the anticipation and receipt of distinct forms of social evaluation. High (but not low) social reticence in early childhood predicted greater act...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Jarcho, J. M., Davis, M. M., Shechner, T., Degnan, K. A., Henderson, H. A., Stoddard, J., Fox, N. A., Leibenluft, E., Pine, D. S., Nelson, E. E. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Forgetting Patterns Differentiate Between Two Forms of Memory Representation
For decades, there has been controversy about whether forgetting is caused by decay over time or by interference from irrelevant information. We suggest that forgetting occurs because of decay or interference, depending on the memory representation. Recollection-based memories, supported by the hippocampus, are represented in orthogonal patterns and are therefore relatively resistant to interference from one another. Decay should be a major source of their forgetting. By contrast, familiarity-based memories, supported by extrahippocampal structures, are not represented in orthogonal patterns and are therefore sensitive to ...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sadeh, T., Ozubko, J. D., Winocur, G., Moscovitch, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Going All In: Unfavorable Sex Ratios Attenuate Choice Diversification
When faced with risky decisions, people typically choose to diversify their choices by allocating resources across a variety of options and thus avoid putting "all their eggs in one basket." The current research revealed that this tendency is reversed when people face an important cue to mating-related risk: skew in the operational sex ratio, or the ratio of men to women in the local environment. Counter to the typical strategy of choice diversification, findings from four studies demonstrated that the presence of romantically unfavorable sex ratios (those featuring more same-sex than opposite-sex individuals) led heterose...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Ackerman, J. M., Maner, J. K., Carpenter, S. M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Attentions Accelerator
How do people get attention to operate at peak efficiency in high-pressure situations? We tested the hypothesis that the general mechanism that allows this is the maintenance of multiple target representations in working and long-term memory. We recorded subjects’ event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing the working memory and long-term memory representations used to control attention while performing visual search. We found that subjects used both types of memories to control attention when they performed the visual search task with a large reward at stake, or when they were cued to respond as fast as possible. Howe...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Reinhart, R. M. G., McClenahan, L. J., Woodman, G. F. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Associative Activation and Its Relation to Exploration and Exploitation in the Brain
Associative activation is commonly assumed to rely on associative strength, such that if A is strongly associated with B, B is activated whenever A is activated. We challenged this assumption by examining whether the activation of associations is state dependent. In three experiments, subjects performed a free-association task while the level of a simultaneous load was manipulated in various ways. In all three experiments subjects in the low-load conditions provided significantly more diverse and original associations compared with subjects in the high-load conditions, who exhibited high consensus. In an additional experim...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Baror, S., Bar, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Models of Affective Decision Making: How Do Feelings Predict Choice?
Intuitively, how you feel about potential outcomes will determine your decisions. Indeed, an implicit assumption in one of the most influential theories in psychology, prospect theory, is that feelings govern choice. Surprisingly, however, very little is known about the rules by which feelings are transformed into decisions. Here, we specified a computational model that used feelings to predict choices. We found that this model predicted choice better than existing value-based models, showing a unique contribution of feelings to decisions, over and above value. Similar to the value function in prospect theory, our feeling ...
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Charpentier, C. J., De Neve, J.-E., Li, X., Roiser, J. P., Sharot, T. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
