What you see
Targeted Memory Reactivation During Sleep Improves Next-Day Problem Solving
Kristin Sanders et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many people have claimed that sleep has helped them solve a difficult problem, but empirical support for this assertion remains tentative. The current experiment tested whether manipulating information processing during sleep impacts problem incubation and solving. In memory studies, delivering learning-associated sound cues during sleep can reactivate memories. We therefore predicted that reactivating previously unsolved problems could help people solve them. In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented. The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement). Moreover, cued-puzzle solving correlated with cued-puzzle memory. Overall, these results demonstrate that cuing puzzle information during sleep can facilitate solving, thus supporting sleep’s role in problem incubation and establishing a new technique to advance understanding of problem solving and sleep cognition.
The neural representation of self is recapitulated in the brains of friends: A round-robin fMRI study
Robert Chavez & Dylan Wagner
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans continually form and update impressions of each other’s identities based on the disclosure of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. At the same time, individuals also have specific beliefs and knowledge about their own self-concept. Over a decade of social neuroscience research has shown that retrieving information about the self and about other persons recruits similar areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), however it remains unclear if an individual’s neural representation of self is reflected in the brains of well-known others or if instead the two representations share no common relationship. Here we examined this question in a tight-knit network of friends as they engaged in a round-robin trait evaluation task in which each participant was both perceiver and target for every other participant and in addition also evaluated their self. Using functional MRI and a multilevel modeling approach, we show that multivoxel brain activity patterns in the MPFC during a person’s self-referential thought are correlated with those of friends when thinking of that same person. Moreover, the similarity of neural self–other patterns was itself positively associated with the similarity of self–other trait judgments ratings as measured behaviorally in a separate session. These findings suggest that accuracy in person perception may be predicated on the degree to which the brain activity pattern associated with an individual thinking about their own self-concept is similarly reflected in the brains of others.
The powerful influence of marks: Visual and knowledge-driven processing in hurricane track displays
Lace Padilla, Sarah Creem-Regehr & William Thompson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given the widespread use of visualizations to communicate hazard risks, forecast visualizations must be as effective to interpret as possible. However, despite incorporating best practices, visualizations can influence viewer judgments in ways that the designers did not anticipate. Visualization designers should understand the full implications of visualization techniques and seek to develop visualizations that account for the complexities in decision-making. The current study explores the influence of visualizations of uncertainty by examining a case in which ensemble hurricane forecast visualizations produce unintended interpretations. We show that people estimate more damage to a location that is overlapped by a track in an ensemble hurricane forecast visualization compared to a location that does not coincide with a track. We find that this effect can be partially reduced by manipulating the number of hurricane paths displayed, suggesting the importance of visual features of a display on decision making. Providing instructions about the information conveyed in the ensemble display also reduced the effect, but importantly, did not eliminate it. These findings illustrate the powerful influence of marks and their encodings on decision-making with visualizations.
A hard to read font reduces the causality bias
Marcos Díaz-Lago & Helena Matute
Judgment and Decision Making, September 2019, pp. 547–554
Abstract:
Previous studies have demonstrated that fluency affects judgment and decision-making. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of perceptual fluency in a causal learning task that usually induces an illusion of causality in non-contingent conditions. We predicted that a reduction of fluency could improve accuracy in the detection of non-contingency and, therefore, could be used to debias illusory perceptions of causality. Participants were randomly assigned to either an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read condition. Our results showed a strong bias (i.e., overestimation) of causality in those participants who performed the non-contingent task in the easy-to-read font, which replicated the standard causality bias effect. This effect was reduced when the same task was presented in a hard-to-read font. Overall, our results provide evidence for a reduction of the causality bias when presenting the problem in a hard-to-read font. This suggests that perceptual fluency affects causal judgments.
Mind–Body Dissonance: A Catalyst to Creativity
Li Huang
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Mind–body dissonance (MBD) is the psychological experience of one’s bodily expressions contradicting one’s mental states. Across four experiments (total N = 887), the current research proposes and demonstrates that MBD can enhance creativity by facilitating an atypicality mind-set. First, two different instantiations of MBD (i.e., assuming a high-power/low-power role while adopting a constricted/expansive posture, or recalling a happy/sad memory while frowning/smiling) increased performance on creative association, insight, and generation tasks (Experiments 1 and 2). A third study showed that an atypicality mind-set was an underlying mechanism for the creativity effect (Experiment 3). Finally, the frequency of past MBD experiences was found to reduce MBD’s creativity effect (Experiment 4). The present research offers evidence for the positive functions of bodily expressions that contradict mental states and highlights the significance of understanding the interactive effects of psychological states and their physical analogues in studying creativity.
Limited resources or limited luck? Why people perceive an illusory negative correlation between the outcomes of choice options despite unequivocal evidence for independence
Déborah Marciano et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, September 2019, Pages 573–590
Abstract:
When people learn of the outcome of an option they did not choose (the alternative outcome) before they know their own outcome, they see an illusory negative correlation between the two outcomes, the Alternative Omen Effect (ALOE). Why does this happen? Here, we tested several alternative explanations and conclude that the ALOE may derive from a pervasive belief that good luck is a limited resource. In Experiment 1, we show that the ALOE is due to people seeing a good alternative outcome as a bad sign regarding their outcome, relative to seeing a neutral alternative, but find no evidence for seeing a bad alternative outcome as a good sign. Experiment 2 confirms that the ALOE replicates across tasks, and that the ALOE cannot be explained by preconceptions regarding outcome distribution, including: 1) the Limited Good Hypothesis (zero-sum bias), according to which people see the world as a zero-sum game, and assume that resources there means fewer resources here, and/or 2) a more specific assumption that laboratory tasks are programmed as zero-sum games. To neutralize these potential beliefs, participants had to draw actual colored beads from two real, distinct bags. The results of Experiment 3 were consistent with a prediction of the Limited Luck Hypothesis: by eliminating the value of the outcomes we eliminated the ALOE. Taken together, our results show that either the limited good belief is so robust that it defies strong situational evidence, or that individuals perceive good luck itself as a limited resource. Such a limited-luck belief might have important consequences in decision making and negotiations.