Articles

People’s explanatory preferences for scientific phenomena

Previous work has found that people are drawn to explanations of psychological phenomena when these explanations contain neuroscience information, even when that information is irrelevant. This preference may ...

Authors: Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Emily J. Hopkins and Jordan C. V. Taylor

Neuroscientific explanations and the stigma of mental disorder: a meta-analytic study

Genetic and other biological explanations appear to have mixed blessings for the stigma of mental disorder. Meta-analytic evidence shows that these “biogenetic” explanations reduce the blame attached to suffer...

Authors: Amy Loughman and Nick Haslam

The relationship between confidence and accuracy with verbal and verbal + numeric confidence scales

Police departments often use verbal confidence measures (highly confident, somewhat confident) with a small number of values, whereas psychologists measuring the confidence–accuracy relationship typically use ...

Authors: Eylul Tekin, Wenbo Lin and Henry L. Roediger III

App icon similarity and its impact on visual search efficiency on mobile touch devices

Users of mobile touch devices are often confronted with a great number of apps, challenging an efficient access to single applications. Especially when looking for infrequently used apps, users have to perform...

Authors: Anna K. Trapp and Carolin Wienrich

The easy-to-hard training advantage with real-world medical images

Many medical professions require practitioners to perform visual categorizations in domains such as radiology, dermatology, and neurology. However, acquiring visual expertise is tedious and time-consuming and ...

Authors: Brett D. Roads, Buyun Xu, June K. Robinson and James W. Tanaka

Search templates that incorporate within-face variation improve visual search for faces

Searching for unfamiliar faces in crowds is an important task in modern society. In surveillance and security settings, it is sometimes critical to locate a target individual quickly and accurately. In this st...

Authors: James D. Dunn, Richard I. Kemp and David White

When to look at maps in navigation: metacognitive control in environment learning

People learn environments through direct experience with the environment and/or through map study. Further, the different perspectives taken while learning an environment influence the knowledge acquired. Afte...

Authors: Ruizhi Dai, Ayanna K. Thomas and Holly A. Taylor

How the stimulus influences mind wandering in semantically rich task contexts

What do we think about when we mind wander and where do these thoughts come from? We tested the idea that semantically rich stimuli yield patterns of mind wandering that are closely coupled with the stimuli co...

Authors: Myrthe Faber and Sidney K. D’Mello

Correction to: Decision making with visualizations: a cognitive framework across disciplines

The original article (Padilla et al., 2018) contained a formatting error in Table 2; this has now been corrected with the appropriate boxes marked clearly.

Authors: Lace M. Padilla, Sarah H. Creem-Regehr, Mary Hegarty and Jeanine K. Stefanucci

Postdictive confidence (but not predictive confidence) predicts eyewitness memory accuracy

If testing conditions are uncontaminated, confidence at test reliably predicts eyewitness memory accuracy. Unfortunately, information about eyewitness postdictive confidence (at the time of the identification ...

Authors: Thao B. Nguyen, Erica Abed and Kathy Pezdek

It is not good to talk: conversation has a fixed interference cost on attention regardless of difficulty

It is well-documented that telephone conversations lead to impaired driving performance. Kunar et al. (Psychon Bull Rev 15:1135–1140, 2008) showed that this deficit was, in part, due to a dual-task cost of con...

Authors: Melina A. Kunar, Louise Cole, Angeline Cox and Jessica Ocampo

Inversion effects in the expert classification of mammograms and faces

A hallmark of a perceptual expert is the ability to detect and categorize stimuli in their domain of expertise after brief exposure. For example, expert radiologists can differentiate between “abnormal” and “n...

Authors: Michael D. Chin, Karla K. Evans, Jeremy M. Wolfe, Jonathan Bowen and James W. Tanaka

Individual differences in eyewitness accuracy across multiple lineups of faces

Theories of face recognition in cognitive psychology stipulate that the hallmark of accurate identification is the ability to recognize a person consistently, across different encounters. In this study, we app...

Authors: Andrew J. Russ, Melanie Sauerland, Charlotte E. Lee and Markus Bindemann

Decision making with visualizations: a cognitive framework across disciplines

Visualizations—visual representations of information, depicted in graphics—are studied by researchers in numerous ways, ranging from the study of the basic principles of creating visualizations, to the cogniti...

Authors: Lace M. Padilla, Sarah H. Creem-Regehr, Mary Hegarty and Jeanine K. Stefanucci

The impact of speed and bias on the cognitive processes of experts and novices in medical image decision-making

Training individuals to make accurate decisions from medical images is a critical component of education in diagnostic pathology. We describe a joint experimental and computational modeling approach to examine...

Authors: Jennifer S. Trueblood, William R. Holmes, Adam C. Seegmiller, Jonathan Douds, Margaret Compton, Eszter Szentirmai, Megan Woodruff, Wenrui Huang, Charles Stratton and Quentin Eichbaum

Detecting morphed passport photos: a training and individual differences approach

Our reliance on face photos for identity verification is at odds with extensive research which shows that matching pairs of unfamiliar faces is highly prone to error. This process can therefore be exploited by...

Authors: David J. Robertson, Andrew Mungall, Derrick G. Watson, Kimberley A. Wade, Sophie J. Nightingale and Stephen Butler

Use-inspired basic research on individual differences in face identification: implications for criminal investigation and security

This journal is dedicated to “use-inspired basic research” where a problem in the world shapes the hypotheses for study in the laboratory. This review considers the role of individual variation in face identif...

Authors: Karen Lander, Vicki Bruce and Markus Bindemann

Improving face identification with specialist teams

People vary in their ability to identify faces, and this variability is relatively stable across repeated testing. This suggests that recruiting high performers can improve identity verification accuracy in ap...

Authors: Tarryn Balsdon, Stephanie Summersby, Richard I. Kemp and David White

Individual differences in hyper-realistic mask detection

Hyper-realistic masks present a new challenge to security and crime prevention. We have recently shown that people’s ability to differentiate these masks from real faces is extremely limited. Here we consider ...

Authors: Jet G. Sanders and Rob Jenkins

Face recognition ability does not predict person identification performance: using individual data in the interpretation of group results

There are large individual differences in people’s face recognition ability. These individual differences provide an opportunity to recruit the best face-recognisers into jobs that require accurate person iden...

Authors: Eilidh Noyes, Matthew Q. Hill and Alice J. O’Toole

Applied screening tests for the detection of superior face recognition

In recent years there has been growing interest in the identification of people with superior face recognition skills, for both theoretical and applied investigations. These individuals have mostly been identi...

Authors: Sarah Bate, Charlie Frowd, Rachel Bennetts, Nabil Hasshim, Ebony Murray, Anna K. Bobak, Harriet Wills and Sarah Richards

Individual differences in face identity processing

We investigated the relationships between individual differences in different aspects of face-identity processing, using the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT) as a measure of unfamiliar face perception, the Ca...

Authors: Jennifer M. McCaffery, David J. Robertson, Andrew W. Young and A. Mike Burton

Individual differences in the detection, matching and memory of faces

Previous research has explored relationships between individual performance in the detection, matching and memory of faces, but under limiting conditions. The current study sought to extend previous findings w...

Authors: Matthew C. Fysh

Photo ID verification remains challenging despite years of practice

Matching unfamiliar faces to photographic identification (ID) documents occurs across many domains, including financial transactions (e.g., mortgage documents), controlling the purchase of age-restricted goods...

Authors: Megan H. Papesh

Individual differences in face perception and person recognition

Authors: Vicki Bruce, Markus Bindemann and Karen Lander

Mammography to tomosynthesis: examining the differences between two-dimensional and segmented-three-dimensional visual search

Radiological techniques for breast cancer detection are undergoing a massive technological shift—moving from mammography, a process that takes a two-dimensional (2D) image of breast tissue, to tomosynthesis, a...

Authors: Stephen H. Adamo, Justin M. Ericson, Joseph C. Nah, Rachel Brem and Stephen R. Mitroff

The impact of video speed on the decision-making process of sports officials

There is an increasing trend in association football (soccer) to assist referees in their decision-making with video technology. For decisions such as whether a goal has been scored or which player actually co...

Authors: Jochim Spitz, Pieter Moors, Johan Wagemans and Werner F. Helsen

Disgust and the rubber hand illusion: a registered replication report of Jalal, Krishnakumar, and Ramachandran (2015)

Heightened experience of disgust is a feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), particularly contamination-related OCD (C-OCD). Previous studies of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) reported that the sense ...

Authors: Hiroshi Nitta, Haruto Tomita, Yi Zhang, Xinxin Zhou and Yuki Yamada

Web pages: What can you see in a single fixation?

Research in human vision suggests that in a single fixation, humans can extract a significant amount of information from a natural scene, e.g. the semantic category, spatial layout, and object identities. This...

Authors: Ali Jahanian, Shaiyan Keshvari and Ruth Rosenholtz

Spatial decision dynamics during wayfinding: intersections prompt the decision-making process

Intersections are critical decision points for wayfinders, but it is unknown how decision dynamics unfold during pedestrian wayfinding. Some research implies that pedestrians leverage available visual cues to ...

Authors: Tad T. Brunyé, Aaron L. Gardony, Amanda Holmes and Holly A. Taylor

New approaches to the analysis of eye movement behaviour across expertise while viewing brain MRIs

Brain tumour detection and diagnosis requires clinicians to inspect and analyse brain magnetic resonance images. Eye-tracking is commonly used to examine observers’ gaze behaviour during such medical image int...

Authors: Emily M. Crowe, Iain D. Gilchrist and Christopher Kent

Finding cancer in mammograms: if you know it’s there, do you know where?

Humans can extract considerable information from scenes, even when these are presented extremely quickly. The ability of an experienced radiologist to rapidly detect an abnormality on a mammogram may build upo...

Authors: Ann J. Carrigan, Susan G. Wardle and Anina N. Rich

Musical training, bilingualism, and executive function: working memory and inhibitory control

The current study investigated whether long-term experience in music or a second language is associated with enhanced cognitive functioning. Early studies suggested the possibility of a cognitive advantage fro...

Authors: Annalise A. D’Souza, Linda Moradzadeh and Melody Wiseheart

Hand proximity effects are fragile: a useful null result

Placing one’s hands near an object has been reported to enhance visual processing in a number of ways. We explored whether hand proximity confers an advantage when applied to complex visual search. In one expe...

Authors: Ronald Andringa, Walter R. Boot, Nelson A. Roque and Sadhana Ponnaluri

Theoretical vs. empirical discriminability: the application of ROC methods to eyewitness identification

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was introduced to the field of eyewitness identification 5 years ago. Since that time, it has been both influential and controversial, and the debate has raised...

Authors: John T. Wixted and Laura Mickes

Temporal fractals in movies and mind

Fractal patterns are seemingly everywhere. They can be analyzed through Fourier and power analyses, and other methods. Cutting, DeLong, and Nothelfer (2010) analyzed as time-series data the fluctuations of sho...

Authors: James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong and Kaitlin L. Brunick

Embodied learning: introducing a taxonomy based on bodily engagement and task integration

Research on learning and education is increasingly influenced by theories of embodied cognition. Several embodiment-based interventions have been empirically investigated, including gesturing, interactive digi...

Authors: Alexander Skulmowski and Günter Daniel Rey

Color inference in visual communication: the meaning of colors in recycling

People interpret abstract meanings from colors, which makes color a useful perceptual feature for visual communication. This process is complicated, however, because there is seldom a one-to-one correspondence...

Authors: Karen B. Schloss, Laurent Lessard, Charlotte S. Walmsley and Kathleen Foley

Redundant-target processing is robust against changes to task load

Monitoring visual displays while performing other tasks is commonplace in many operational environments. Although dividing attention between tasks can impair monitoring accuracy and response times, it is uncle...

Authors: Stephanie A. Morey, Nicole A. Thomas and Jason S. McCarley

Visual adaptation and the amplitude spectra of radiological images

We examined how visual sensitivity and perception are affected by adaptation to the characteristic amplitude spectra of X-ray mammography images. Because of the transmissive nature of X-ray photons, these imag...

Authors: Elysse Kompaniez-Dunigan, Craig K. Abbey, John M. Boone and Michael A. Webster

Teaching the science of learning

The science of learning has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of effective teaching and learning strategies. However, few instructors outside of the field are privy to this research. In thi...

Authors: Yana Weinstein, Christopher R. Madan and Megan A. Sumeracki

Exploring the practicing-connections hypothesis: using gesture to support coordination of ideas in understanding a complex statistical concept

In this article, we begin to lay out a framework and approach for studying how students come to understand complex concepts in rich domains. Grounded in theories of embodied cognition, we advance the view that...

Authors: Ji Y. Son, Priscilla Ramos, Melissa DeWolf, William Loftus and James W. Stigler

The range of confidence scales does not affect the relationship between confidence and accuracy in recognition memory

Researchers use a wide range of confidence scales when measuring the relationship between confidence and accuracy in reports from memory, with the highest number usually representing the greatest confidence (e...

Authors: Eylul Tekin and Henry L. Roediger III

The impact of fillers on lineup performance

Filler siphoning theory posits that the presence of fillers (known innocents) in a lineup protects an innocent suspect from being chosen by siphoning choices away from that innocent suspect. This mechanism has...

Authors: Stacy A. Wetmore, Ryan M. McAdoo, Scott D. Gronlund and Jeffrey S. Neuschatz

Eye movement feedback fails to improve visual search performance

Many real-world searches (e.g., radiology and baggage screening) have rare targets. When targets are rare, observers perform rapid, incomplete searches, leading to higher miss rates. To improve search for rare...

Authors: Chad Peltier and Mark W. Becker

What is the role of the film viewer? The effects of narrative comprehension and viewing task on gaze control in film

Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers’ attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bo...

Authors: John P. Hutson, Tim J. Smith, Joseph P. Magliano and Lester C. Loschky

The effect of testing can increase or decrease misinformation susceptibility depending on the retention interval

Research has consistently demonstrated that testing prior to the presentation of misleading post-event information, within the context of a standard eyewitness misinformation paradigm, results in an increase i...

Authors: Ayanna K. Thomas, Leamarie T. Gordon, Paul M. Cernasov and John B. Bulevich

Simple eye-movement feedback during visual search is not helpful

Searching for targets in the visual world, or visual search, is something we all do every day. We frequently make ‘false-negative’ errors, wherein we erroneously conclude a target was absent when one was, in f...

Authors: Trafton Drew and Lauren H. Williams

Hyper-realistic face masks: a new challenge in person identification

We often identify people using face images. This is true in occupational settings such as passport control as well as in everyday social environments. Mapping between images and identities assumes that facial ...

Authors: Jet Gabrielle Sanders, Yoshiyuki Ueda, Kazusa Minemoto, Eilidh Noyes, Sakiko Yoshikawa and Rob Jenkins

Prequestions do not enhance the benefits of retrieval in a STEM classroom

Answering questions before a learning episode—“prequestions”—can enhance memory for that information. A number of studies have explored this effect in the laboratory; however, few studies have examined preques...

Authors: Jason Geller, Shana K. Carpenter, Monica H. Lamm, Shuhebur Rahman, Patrick I. Armstrong and Clark R. Coffman