Metacognition, public health compliance, and vaccination willingness.

Metacognition, our ability to reflect on our own beliefs, manifests itself in the confidence we have in these beliefs, and helps us guide our behavior in complex and uncertain environments. Here, we provide empirical tests of the importance of metacognition during the pandemic. Bayesian and frequentist analyses demonstrate that citizens with higher metacognitive sensitivity-where confidence differentiates correct from incorrect COVID-19 beliefs-reported higher willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19, and higher compliance with recommended public health measures. Notably, this benefit of accurate introspection held controlling for the accuracy of COVID-19 beliefs. By demonstrating how vaccination willingness and compliance may relate to insight into the varying accuracy of beliefs, rather than only the accuracy of the beliefs themselves, this research highlights the critical role of metacognitive ability in times of crisis. However, we do not find sufficient evidence to conclude that citizens with higher metacognitive sensitivity were more likely to comply with recommended public health measures when controlling for the absolute level of the confidence citizens had in their COVID-19 beliefs.

Modal and amodal cognition: an overarching principle in various domains of psychology.

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this paper, we suggest that both formats play a major role in most cognitive domains. We believe that a comprehensive theory of cognition requires a solid understanding of these representational formats and their functional roles within and across different domains of cognition, the developmental trajectory of these representational formats, and their role in dysfunctional behavior. Here we sketch such an overarching perspective that brings together research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology on modal and amodal representational formats so as to unravel their functional principles and their interactions.

Online Interaction Turns the Congeniality Bias Into an Uncongeniality Bias.

Online phenomena like echo chambers and polarization are believed to be driven by humans' penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behavior, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behavior changes when people are given an opportunity to reply to dissenters. Three experiments (total N = 320; convenience student samples from Germany) and an internal meta-analysis show that in a discussion-forum setting where participants can reply to earlier comments larger cognitive conflict between participant attitude and comment attitude predicts higher likelihood to respond (uncongeniality bias). When the discussion climate was friendly (vs. oppositional) to the views of participants, the uncongeniality bias was more pronounced and was also associated with attitude polarization. These results suggest that belief polarization on social media may not only be driven by congeniality but also by conflict.

Long-term memory representations for audio-visual scenes.

In this study, we investigated the nature of long-term memory representations for naturalistic audio-visual scenes. Whereas previous research has shown that audio-visual scenes are recognized more accurately than their unimodal counterparts, it remains unclear whether this benefit stems from audio-visually integrated long-term memory representations or a summation of independent retrieval cues. We tested two predictions for audio-visually integrated memory representations. First, we used a modeling approach to test whether recognition performance for audio-visual scenes is more accurate than would be expected from independent retrieval cues. This analysis shows that audio-visual integration is not necessary to explain the benefit of audio-visual scenes relative to purely auditory or purely visual scenes. Second, we report a series of experiments investigating the occurrence of study-test congruency effects for unimodal and audio-visual scenes. Most importantly, visually encoded information was immune to additional auditory information presented during testing, whereas auditory encoded information was susceptible to additional visual information presented during testing. This renders a true integration of visual and auditory information in long-term memory representations unlikely. In sum, our results instead provide evidence for visual dominance in long-term memory. Whereas associative auditory information is capable of enhancing memory performance, the long-term memory representations appear to be primarily visual.

Cross-codal integration of bridging-event information in narrative understanding.

Visual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging-event information (i.e., pictures, text) affects the understanding of visual narrative events. In Experiment 1, bridging-event information was either present (as picture or text) or absent (i.e., not shown). The viewing times for the subsequent picture depicting the end state of the action were comparable within the absent and the text conditions. Further, the viewing times for the end-state picture were significantly longer in the text condition as compared to the pictorial condition. In Experiment 2, we tested whether replacing bridging-event information with a blank panel increases viewing times in a way similar to the text condition. Bridging event information was either present (as picture) or absent (not shown vs. blank panel). The results replicated Experiment 1. Additionally, the viewing times for the end-state pictures were longest in the blank condition. In Experiment 3, we investigated the costs related to integrating information from different codalities by directly comparing the text and picture conditions with the blank condition. The results showed that the distortion caused by the blank panel is larger than the distortion caused by cross-codal integration processes. Summarizing, we conclude that cross-codal information processing during narrative comprehension is possible but associated with additional mental effort. We discuss the results with regard to theories of narrative understanding.

Semantic congruency but not temporal synchrony enhances long-term memory performance for audio-visual scenes.

Human long-term memory for visual objects and scenes is tremendous. Here, we test how auditory information contributes to long-term memory performance for realistic scenes. In a total of six experiments, we manipulated the presentation modality (auditory, visual, audio-visual) as well as semantic congruency and temporal synchrony between auditory and visual information of brief filmic clips. Our results show that audio-visual clips generally elicit more accurate memory performance than unimodal clips. This advantage even increases with congruent visual and auditory information. However, violations of audio-visual synchrony hardly have any influence on memory performance. Memory performance remained intact even with a sequential presentation of auditory and visual information, but finally declined when the matching tracks of one scene were presented separately with intervening tracks during learning. With respect to memory performance, our results therefore show that audio-visual integration is sensitive to semantic congruency but remarkably robust against asymmetries between different modalities.

Short-term transfer effects of Tetris on mental rotation: Review and registered report - A Bayesian approach.

The existence of transfer effects of video games on cognitive performance are controversially discussed in experimental psychology. Whereas recent meta-analyses suggest the absence of far transfer effects, empirical evidence regarding near transfer effects is more controversial. This conceptual replication investigated the short-term near transfer effect of playing Tetris on mental rotation abilities. The design of the conceptual replication was based on a comprehensive compilation of the methods used by previous literature on this topic and advanced in order to reach a high scientific state-of-the-art standard. We ran a high-powered conceptual replication study with 366 participants randomly assigned to either an experimental group playing Tetris or a control group playing Solitaire. Both groups completed three commonly used mental rotation tests in a pre- and a posttest session. Additionally, the experimental group played Tetris while the control group played Solitaire. Playing time was 10 hours in total within 4 weeks. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that this might generate a short-term transfer effect of Tetris on mental rotation. While participants showed a repeated testing effect for the mental rotation tests in both groups, we found evidence that Tetris does not produce a short-term transfer effect on mental rotation. Both gender and expected outcomes did not influence this effect. Our study suggests that playing Tetris does not improve mental rotation skills.

Construction or updating? Event model processes during visual narrative comprehension.

The plot of a narrative is represented in the form of event models in working memory. Because only parts of the plot are actually presented and information is continually changing, comprehenders have to infer a good portion of a narrative and keep their mental representation updated. Research has identified two related processes (e.g., Gernsbacher, 1997): During model construction (shifting, laying a foundation) at large coherence breaks an event model is completely built anew. During model updating (mapping) at smaller omissions, however, the current event model is preserved, and only changed parts are updated through inference processes. Thus far, reliably distinguishing those two processes in visual narratives like comics was difficult. We report a study (N = 80) that aimed to map the differences between constructing and updating event models in visual narratives by combining measures from narrative comprehension and event cognition research and manipulating event structure. Participants watched short visual narratives designed to (not) contain event boundaries at larger coherence breaks and elicit inferences through small omissions, while we collected viewing time measures as well as event segmentation and comprehensibility data. Viewing time, segmentation, and comprehensibility data were in line with the assumption of two distinct comprehension processes. We thus found converging evidence across multiple measures for distinct model construction and updating processes in visual narratives.

The impact of presentation modes on mental rotation processing: a comparative analysis of eye movements and performance.

Mental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of objects in space. Shepard and Metzler's shape-matching tasks, frequently used to test mental rotation, involve presenting pictorial representations of 3D objects. This stimulus material has raised questions regarding the ecological validity of the test for mental rotation with actual visual 3D objects. To systematically investigate differences in mental rotation with pictorial and visual stimuli, we compared data of N = 54 university students from a virtual reality experiment. Comparing both conditions within subjects, we found higher accuracy and faster reaction times for 3D visual figures. We expected eye tracking to reveal differences in participants' stimulus processing and mental rotation strategies induced by the visual differences. We statistically compared fixations (locations), saccades (directions), pupil changes, and head movements. Supplementary Shapley values of a Gradient Boosting Decision Tree algorithm were analyzed, which correctly classified the two conditions using eye and head movements. The results indicated that with visual 3D figures, the encoding of spatial information was less demanding, and participants may have used egocentric transformations and perspective changes. Moreover, participants showed eye movements associated with more holistic processing for visual 3D figures and more piecemeal processing for pictorial 2D figures.

Brain activation during spatial updating and attentive tracking of moving targets.

Keeping aware of the locations of objects while one is moving requires the updating of spatial representations. As long as the objects are visible, attentional tracking is sufficient, but knowing where objects out of view went in relation to one's own body involves an updating of spatial working memory. Here, multiple object tracking was employed to study spatial updating and its neural correlates. In a dynamic 3D-scene, targets moved among visually indistinguishable distractors. The targets and distractors either stayed visible during continuous viewpoint changes or they turned invisible. The parametric variation of tracking load revealed load-dependent activations of the intraparietal sulcus, the superior parietal lobule, and the lateral occipital cortex in response to the attentive tracking task. Viewpoint changes with invisible objects that demanded retention and updating produced load-dependent activation only in the precuneus in line with its presumed involvement in updating spatial working memory.

Polarized climate change beliefs: No evidence for science literacy driving motivated reasoning in a U.S. national study.

A substantial literature shows that public polarization over climate change in the U.S. is most pronounced among the science literate. A dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that science literacy amplifies motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret evidence such that it confirms prior beliefs. The present study tests the biasing account of science literacy in a study among the U.S. population that investigated both interpretation of climate change evidence and repeated belief-updating. Results replicated the typical correlational pattern of political polarization as a function of science literacy. However, results delivered little support for the core causal claim of the biasing account-that science literacy drives motivated reasoning. Hence, these results speak against a mechanism whereby science literacy driving motivated reasoning could explain polarized climate change beliefs among the science literate. This study adds to our growing understanding of the role of science literacy for public beliefs about contested science. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Recognizing dynamic scenes: influence of processing orientation.

From face recognition studies, it is known that instructions are able to change processing orientation of stimuli, leading to an impairment of recognition performance. The present study examined instructional influences on the visual recognition of dynamic scenes. A global processing orientation without any instruction was assumed to lead to highest recognition performance, whereas instructions focusing participants' attention on certain characteristics of the event should lead to a local processing orientation with an impairment of visual recognition performance as a direct consequence. Since the pattern of results provided evidence for this hypothesis, theoretical contributions were discussed.

Conflicting motion information impairs multiple object tracking.

People can keep track of target objects as they move among identical distractors using only spatiotemporal information. We investigated whether or not participants use motion information during the moment-to-moment tracking of objects by adding motion to the texture of moving objects. The texture either remained static or moved relative to the object's direction of motion, either in the same direction, the opposite direction, or orthogonal to each object's trajectory. Results showed that, compared to the static texture condition, tracking performance was worse when the texture moved in the opposite direction of the object and better when the texture moved in the same direction as the object. Our results support the conclusion that motion information is used during the moment-to-moment tracking of objects. Motion information may either affect a representation of position or be used to periodically predict the future location of targets.

DynAOI: a tool for matching eye-movement data with dynamic areas of interest in animations and movies.

Analyzing gaze behavior with dynamic stimulus material is of growing importance in experimental psychology; however, there is still a lack of efficient analysis tools that are able to handle dynamically changing areas of interest. In this article, we present DynAOI, an open-source tool that allows for the definition of dynamic areas of interest. It works automatically with animations that are based on virtual three-dimensional models. When one is working with videos of real-world scenes, a three-dimensional model of the relevant content needs to be created first. The recorded eye-movement data are matched with the static and dynamic objects in the model underlying the video content, thus creating static and dynamic areas of interest. A validation study asking participants to track particular objects demonstrated that DynAOI is an efficient tool for handling dynamic areas of interest.

Canonical views of dynamic scenes.

The visual recognition of dynamic scenes was examined. The authors hypothesized that the notion of canonical views, which has received strong empirical support for static objects, also holds for dynamic scenes. In Experiment 1, viewpoints orthogonal to the main axis of movement in the scene were preferred over other viewpoints, whereas viewpoints in line with the main axis were least preferred. Experiment 2 provided no empirical evidence for a recognition advantage of canonical viewpoints when presented during the initial learning phase, but Experiment 3 showed a cognitive advantage for canonical viewpoints if they were presented as test stimuli during the recognition test. Overall, the findings suggest that on a phenomenological level, viewers are consciously aware of such viewpoints, and, on a cognitive level, viewers benefit from canonical viewpoints in terms of recognition accuracy.

Linguistic Information in Auditory Dynamic Events Contributes to the Detection of Fine, Not Coarse Event Boundaries.

Human observers (comprehenders) segment dynamic information into discrete events. That is, although there is continuous sensory information, comprehenders perceive boundaries between two meaningful units of information. In narrative comprehension, comprehenders use linguistic, non-linguistic , and physical cues for this event boundary perception. Yet, it is an open question - both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective - how linguistic and non-linguistic cues contribute to this process. The current study explores how linguistic cues contribute to the participants' ability to segment continuous auditory information into discrete, hierarchically structured events. Native speakers of German and non-native speakers, who neither spoke nor understood German, segmented a German audio drama into coarse and fine events. Whereas native participants could make use of linguistic, non-linguistic, and physical cues for segmentation, non-native participants could only use non-linguistic and physical cues. We analyzed segmentation behavior in terms of the ability to identify coarse and fine event boundaries and the resulting hierarchical structure. Non-native listeners identified almost identical coarse event boundaries as native listeners, but missed some of the fine event boundaries identified by the native listeners. Interestingly, hierarchical event perception (as measured by hierarchical alignment and enclosure) was comparable for native and non-native participants. In summary, linguistic cues contributed particularly to the identification of certain fine event boundaries. The results are discussed with regard to the current theories of event cognition.

Filling the gap despite full attention: the role of fast backward inferences for event completion.

The comprehension of dynamic naturalistic events poses at least two challenges to the cognitive system: filtering relevant information with attention and dealing with information that was missing or missed. With four experiments, we studied the completion of missing information despite full attention. Participants watched short soccer video clips and we informed participants that we removed a critical moment of ball contact in half of the clips. We asked participants to detect whether these moments of ball contact were present or absent. In Experiment 1, participants gave their detection responses either directly during an event or delayed after an event. Although participants directed their full attention toward the critical contact moment, they were more likely to indicate seeing the missing ball contact if it was followed by a causally matching scene than if it was followed by an unrelated scene, both for the immediate and delayed responses. Thus, event completion occurs quickly. In Experiment 2, only a causally matching scene but neither a white mask nor an irrelevant scene caused the completion of missing information. This indicates that the completion of missing information is caused by backward inferences rather than predictive perception. In Experiment 3, we showed that event completion occurs directly during a trial and does not depend on expectations built up after seeing the same causality condition multiple times. In Experiment 4, we linked our findings to event cognition by asking participants to perform a natural segmentation task. We conclude that observers complete missing information during coherent events based on a fast backward inference mechanism even when directing their attention toward the missing information.

Construction and updating of event models in auditory event processing.

Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between 2 events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model. Increased encoding effort finally leads to a memory benefit at event boundaries. Evidence from reading time studies (increased reading times with increasing amount of change) suggest that updating of event models is incremental. We present results from 5 experiments that studied event processing (including memory formation processes and reading times) using an audio drama as well as a transcript thereof as stimulus material. Experiments 1a and 1b replicated the event boundary advantage effect for memory. In contrast to recent evidence from studies using visual stimulus material, Experiments 2a and 2b found no support for incremental updating with normally sighted and blind participants for recognition memory. In Experiment 3, we replicated Experiment 2a using a written transcript of the audio drama as stimulus material, allowing us to disentangle encoding and retrieval processes. Our results indicate incremental updating processes at encoding (as measured with reading times). At the same time, we again found recognition performance to be unaffected by the amount of change. We discuss these findings in light of current event cognition theories. (PsycINFO Database Record

Studying visual attention using the multiple object tracking paradigm: A tutorial review.

Human observers are capable of tracking multiple objects among identical distractors based only on their spatiotemporal information. Since the first report of this ability in the seminal work of Pylyshyn and Storm (1988, Spatial Vision, 3, 179-197), multiple object tracking has attracted many researchers. A reason for this is that it is commonly argued that the attentional processes studied with the multiple object paradigm apparently match the attentional processing during real-world tasks such as driving or team sports. We argue that multiple object tracking provides a good mean to study the broader topic of continuous and dynamic visual attention. Indeed, several (partially contradicting) theories of attentive tracking have been proposed within the almost 30 years since its first report, and a large body of research has been conducted to test these theories. With regard to the richness and diversity of this literature, the aim of this tutorial review is to provide researchers who are new in the field of multiple object tracking with an overview over the multiple object tracking paradigm, its basic manipulations, as well as links to other paradigms investigating visual attention and working memory. Further, we aim at reviewing current theories of tracking as well as their empirical evidence. Finally, we review the state of the art in the most prominent research fields of multiple object tracking and how this research has helped to understand visual attention in dynamic settings.

Mind the gap: Temporal discontinuities in observed activity streams influence perceived duration of actions.

In everyday life, when observing activities taking place in our environment, we often shift our attention among several activities and therefore perceive each activity sequence piecemeal with temporal gaps in between. Two studies examined whether the length of these gaps influences the processing of the observed activities. Experiment 1 presented film clips depicting activities that were interrupted by either short or long gaps and asked participants to estimate how long the target action presented at the end of the clip would normally take if it were to take place in reality. Using the same activities, Experiment 2 asked participants to judge the duration of the presentation of this target action-that is, how long the target action was presented. Results showed that following long gaps instead of short gaps, target actions are estimated to take longer in reality (Experiment 1), but the depictions themselves are estimated to be shorter (Experiment 2). Following long gaps, target actions seem to be processed pars pro toto as placeholders for longer segments in the stream of events, but in contrast, the depictions themselves appear to be shorter. Results suggest that long gaps lengthen the perceived duration of an event in our cognitive representation and also seem to influence our perception of the duration of the presentation itself.