Articles

Does expressive writing or an instructional intervention reduce the impacts of test anxiety in a college classroom?

Test anxiety is a major concern in education because it causes uncomfortable feelings in test-anxious students and may reduce the validity of exam scores as a measure of learning. As such, brief and cost-effec...

Authors: Sarah J. Myers, Sara D. Davis and Jason C. K. Chan

Editor’s Note: Domain-general cognitive motivation: evidence from economic decision-making

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Children’s ability to edit their memories when learning about the environment from credible and noncredible websites

One of the many sources of information easily available to children is the internet and the millions of websites providing accurate, and sometimes inaccurate, information. In the current investigation, we exam...

Authors: Kim P. Roberts, Katherine R. Wood and Breanne E. Wylie

Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cogn...

Authors: Jihyang Jun, Yi Ni Toh, Caitlin A. Sisk, Roger W. Remington and Vanessa G. Lee

Using change detection to objectively evaluate whether novel over-the-counter drug labels can increase attention to critical health information among older adults

Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs have many benefits but also carry risks, such as adverse drug reactions, which are more prevalent in older adults. Because these products do not require the oversight of a physicia...

Authors: Alyssa L. Harben, Deborah A. Kashy, Shiva Esfahanian, Lanqing Liu, Laura Bix and Mark W. Becker

Infodemic: the effect of death-related thoughts on news-sharing

Research on the sharing of fake news has primarily focused on the manner in which fake news spreads and the literary style of fake news. These studies, however, do not explain how characteristics of fake news ...

Authors: Amy J. Lim, Edison Tan and Tania Lim

The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect

Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing f...

Authors: Aumyo Hassan and Sarah J. Barber

What do laboratory-forgetting paradigms tell us about use-inspired forgetting?

Directed forgetting is a laboratory task in which subjects are told to remember some information and forget other information. In directed forgetting tasks, participants are able to exert intentional control o...

Authors: Paul S. Scotti and Ashleigh M. Maxcey

Out of fright, out of mind: impaired memory for information negated during looming threat

People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. Because anxiety and stress can impair cogniti...

Authors: Vera E. Newman, Hannah F. Yee, Adrian R. Walker, Metaxia Toumbelekis and Steven B. Most

The Predation Game: Does dividing attention affect patterns of human foraging?

Attention is known to play an important role in shaping the behaviour of both human and animal foragers. Here, in three experiments, we built on previous interactive tasks to create an online foraging game for...

Authors: Ian M. Thornton, Jérôme Tagu, Sunčica Zdravković and Árni Kristjánsson

Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity

The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading which refers to the externalization of...

Authors: Hauke S. Meyerhoff, Sandra Grinschgl, Frank Papenmeier and Sam J. Gilbert

Improved X-ray baggage screening sensitivity with ‘targetless’ search training

When searching for a known target, mental representations of target features, or templates, guide attention towards matching objects and facilitate recognition. When only distractor features are known, distrac...

Authors: Alex Muhl-Richardson, Maximilian G. Parker, Sergio A. Recio, Maria Tortosa-Molina, Jennifer L. Daffron and Greg J. Davis

Why are the batteries in the microwave?: Use of semantic information under uncertainty in a search task

A major problem in human cognition is to understand how newly acquired information and long-standing beliefs about the environment combine to make decisions and plan behaviors. Over-dependence on long-standing...

Authors: Gwendolyn L. Rehrig, Michelle Cheng, Brian C. McMahan and Rahul Shome

Two people, one graph: the effect of rotated viewpoints on accessibility of data visualizations

In co-located, multi-user settings such as multi-touch tables, user interfaces need to be accessible from multiple viewpoints. In this project, we investigated how this goal can be achieved for depictions of d...

Authors: Tjark Müller, Friedrich W. Hesse and Hauke S. Meyerhoff

Real-time prediction of short-timescale fluctuations in cognitive workload

Human operators often experience large fluctuations in cognitive workload over seconds timescales that can lead to sub-optimal performance, ranging from overload to neglect. Adaptive automation could potential...

Authors: Udo Boehm, Dora Matzke, Matthew Gretton, Spencer Castro, Joel Cooper, Michael Skinner, David Strayer and Andrew Heathcote

Spatially and temporally distributed data foraging decisions in disciplinary field science

How do scientists generate and weight candidate queries for hypothesis testing, and how does learning from observations or experimental data impact query selection? Field sciences offer a compelling context to...

Authors: Cristina G. Wilson, Feifei Qian, Douglas J. Jerolmack, Sonia Roberts, Jonathan Ham, Daniel Koditschek and Thomas F. Shipley

When and why do people act on flawed science? Effects of anecdotes and prior beliefs on evidence-based decision-making

Today’s citizens are expected to use evidence, frequently presented in the media, to inform decisions about health, behavior, and public policy. However, science misinformation is ubiquitous in the media, maki...

Authors: Audrey L. Michal, Yiwen Zhong and Priti Shah

Expert camouflage-breakers can accurately localize search targets

Camouflage-breaking is a special case of visual search where an object of interest, or target, can be hard to distinguish from the background even when in plain view. We have previously shown that naive, non-p...

Authors: Fallon Branch, Allison JoAnna Lewis, Isabella Noel Santana and Jay Hegdé

g versus c: comparing individual and collective intelligence across two meta-analyses

Collective intelligence (CI) is said to manifest in a group’s domain general mental ability. It can be measured across a battery of group IQ tests and statistically reduced to a latent factor called the “c-factor...

Authors: Luke I. Rowe, John Hattie and Robert Hester

When experience does not promote expertise: security professionals fail to detect low prevalence fake IDs

Professional screeners frequently verify photograph IDs in such industries as professional security, bar tending, and sales of age-restricted materials. Moreover, security screening is a vital tool for law enf...

Authors: Dawn R. Weatherford, Devin Roberson and William Blake Erickson

The role of analytical reasoning and source credibility on the evaluation of real and fake full-length news articles

Previous research has focused on accuracy associated with real and fake news presented in the form of news headlines only, which does not capture the rich context news is frequently encountered in real life. A...

Authors: Didem Pehlivanoglu, Tian Lin, Farha Deceus, Amber Heemskerk, Natalie C. Ebner and Brian S. Cahill

Improving college students’ fact-checking strategies through lateral reading instruction in a general education civics course

College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a nationa...

Authors: Jessica E. Brodsky, Patricia J. Brooks, Donna Scimeca, Ralitsa Todorova, Peter Galati, Michael Batson, Robert Grosso, Michael Matthews, Victor Miller and Michael Caulfield

The illusion of absence: how a common feature of magic shows can explain a class of road accidents

The purpose of the present note is to draw attention to the potential role of a recently discovered visual illusion in creating traffic accidents. The illusion consists in a compelling and immediate experience...

Authors: Vebjørn Ekroll, Mats Svalebjørg, Angelo Pirrone, Gisela Böhm, Sebastian Jentschke, Rob van Lier, Johan Wagemans and Alena Høye

Location probability learning in 3-dimensional virtual search environments

When a visual search target frequently appears in one target-rich region of space, participants learn to search there first, resulting in faster reaction time when the target appears there than when it appears...

Authors: Caitlin A. Sisk, Victoria Interrante and Yuhong V. Jiang

Why spatial is special in education, learning, and everyday activities

Authors: Toru Ishikawa and Nora S. Newcombe

Great expectations: minor differences in initial instructions have a major impact on visual search in the absence of feedback

Professions such as radiology and aviation security screening that rely on visual search—the act of looking for targets among distractors—often cannot provide operators immediate feedback, which can create sit...

Authors: Patrick H. Cox, Dwight J. Kravitz and Stephen R. Mitroff

Group decisions based on confidence weighted majority voting

It has repeatedly been reported that, when making decisions under uncertainty, groups outperform individuals. Real groups are often replaced by simulated groups: Instead of performing an actual group discussio...

Authors: Sascha Meyen, Dorothee M. B. Sigg, Ulrike von Luxburg and Volker H. Franz

Visual search under physical effort is faster but more vulnerable to distractor interference

Cognition and action are often intertwined in everyday life. It is thus pivotal to understand how cognitive processes operate with concurrent actions. The present study aims to assess how simple physical effor...

Authors: Hyung-Bum Park, Shinhae Ahn and Weiwei Zhang

The effect of expertise, target usefulness and image structure on visual search

Experts outperform novices on many cognitive and perceptual tasks. Extensive training has tuned experts to the most relevant information in their specific domain, allowing them to make decisions quickly and ac...

Authors: Samuel G. Robson, Jason M. Tangen and Rachel A. Searston

Self-explaining roads: What does visual cognition tell us about designing safer roads?

In 1995, Theeuwes and Godthelp published a paper called “self-explaining roads,” in which they argued for the development of a new concept for approaching safe road design. Since this publication, self-explain...

Authors: Jan Theeuwes

Testing encoding specificity and the diagnostic feature-detection theory of eyewitness identification, with implications for showups, lineups, and partially disguised perpetrators

The diagnostic feature-detection theory (DFT) of eyewitness identification is based on facial information that is diagnostic versus non-diagnostic of suspect guilt. It primarily has been tested by discounting ...

Authors: Curt A. Carlson, Jacob A. Hemby, Alex R. Wooten, Alyssa R. Jones, Robert F. Lockamyeir, Maria A. Carlson, Jennifer L. Dias and Jane E. Whittington

Visual search behavior and performance in luggage screening: effects of time pressure, automation aid, and target expectancy

Visual inspection of luggage using X-ray technology at airports is a time-sensitive task that is often supported by automated systems to increase performance and reduce workload. The present study evaluated ho...

Authors: Tobias Rieger, Lydia Heilmann and Dietrich Manzey

Updating our understanding of situation awareness in relation to remote operators of autonomous vehicles

The introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) could prevent many accidents attributable to human driver error. However, even entirely driverless vehicles will sometimes require remote human intervention. Curre...

Authors: Clare Mutzenich, Szonya Durant, Shaun Helman and Polly Dalton

Searching in CCTV: effects of organisation in the multiplex

CCTV plays a prominent role in public security, health and safety. Monitoring large arrays of CCTV camera feeds is a visually and cognitively demanding task. Arranging the scenes by geographical proximity in t...

Authors: Benjamin W. Tatler

When more is more: redundant modifiers can facilitate visual search

According to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, speakers provide the amount of information listeners require to correctly interpret an utterance, and no more (Grice in Logic and conversation, 1975). However, speak...

Authors: Gwendolyn Rehrig, Reese A. Cullimore, John M. Henderson and Fernanda Ferreira

A starring role for inference in the neurocognition of visual narratives

Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped “action stars” whe...

Authors: Neil Cohn

Eye movements reflect expertise development in hybrid search

Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, o...

Authors: Megan H. Papesh, Michael C. Hout, Juan D. Guevara Pinto, Arryn Robbins and Alexis Lopez

The relationship between political affiliation and beliefs about sources of “fake news”

The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw an explosion in popularity for the term “fake news.” This phenomenon raises interesting questions: Which news sources do people believe are fake, and what do people think ...

Authors: Robert B. Michael and Brooke O. Breaux

How the wisdom of crowds, and of the crowd within, are affected by expertise

We investigated the effect of expertise on the wisdom of crowds. Participants completed 60 trials of a numerical estimation task, during which they saw 50–100 asterisks and were asked to estimate how many star...

Authors: Joshua L. Fiechter and Nate Kornell

Domain-general cognitive motivation: evidence from economic decision-making

Stable individual differences in cognitive motivation (i.e., the tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities) have been documented with self-report measures, yet convergent support for a tra...

Authors: Jennifer L. Crawford, Sarah A. Eisenstein, Jonathan E. Peelle and Todd S. Braver

How can basic research on spatial cognition enhance the visual accessibility of architecture for people with low vision?

People with visual impairment often rely on their residual vision when interacting with their spatial environments. The goal of visual accessibility is to design spaces that allow for safe travel for the large...

Authors: Sarah H. Creem-Regehr, Erica M. Barhorst-Cates, Margaret R. Tarampi, Kristina M. Rand and Gordon E. Legge

How a picture becomes a word: individual differences in the development of language-mediated visual search

Over the course of our lifetimes, we accumulate extensive experience associating the things that we see with the words we have learned to describe them. As a result, adults engaged in a visual search task will...

Authors: Sarah Chabal, Sayuri Hayakawa and Viorica Marian

The impact of predictability on dual-task performance and implications for resource-sharing accounts

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of predictability on dual-task performance by systematically manipulating predictability in either one of two tasks, as well as between tasks. According to capac...

Authors: Laura Broeker, Harald Ewolds, Rita F. de Oliveira, Stefan Künzell and Markus Raab

Limited not lazy: a quasi-experimental secondary analysis of evidence quality evaluations by those who hold implausible beliefs

Past research suggests that an uncritical or ‘lazy’ style of evaluating evidence may play a role in the development and maintenance of implausible beliefs. We examine this possibility by using a quasi-experime...

Authors: Kristy A. Martire, Bethany Growns, Agnes S. Bali, Bronte Montgomery-Farrer, Stephanie Summersby and Mariam Younan

You don’t have to tell a story! A registered report testing the effectiveness of narrative versus non-narrative misinformation corrections

Misinformation often has an ongoing effect on people’s memory and inferential reasoning even after clear corrections are provided; this is known as the continued influence effect. In pursuit of more effective ...

Authors: Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Lucy H. Butler and Anne Hamby

Individual differences in susceptibility to false memories for COVID-19 fake news

Exposure to ‘fake news’ can result in false memories, with possible consequences for downstream behaviour. Given the sharp rise in online misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, it is important to unde...

Authors: Ciara M. Greene and Gillian Murphy

Going, going, gone: competitive decision-making in Dutch auctions

In a Dutch auction, an item is offered for sale at a set maximum price. The price is then gradually lowered over a fixed interval of time until a bid is made, securing the item for the bidder at the current pr...

Authors: Murray Bennett, Rachel Mullard, Marc T. P. Adam, Mark Steyvers, Scott Brown and Ami Eidels

Focus on the notice: evidence of spatial skills’ effect on middle school learning from a computer simulation

This article represents the findings from the qualitative portion of a mixed methods study that investigated the impact of middle school students’ spatial skills on their plate tectonics learning while using a...

Authors: Colleen M. Epler-Ruths, Scott McDonald, Amy Pallant and Hee-Sun Lee

Heat and fraud: evaluating how room temperature influences fraud likelihood

Despite the considerable amount of research devoted to understanding fraud, few studies have examined how the physical environment can influence the likelihood of committing fraud. One recent study found a lin...

Authors: Huanxu Liu, Jingwen Yang and Yuki Yamada

Surgical face masks impair human face matching performance for familiar and unfamiliar faces

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments around the world now recommend, or require, that their citizens cover the lower half of their face in public. Consequently, many people now wear surgical ...

Authors: Daniel J. Carragher and Peter J. B. Hancock