Choice enhances touch pleasantness.

We value what we choose more than what is imposed upon us. Choice-induced preferences are extensively demonstrated using behavioural and neural methods, mainly involving rewarding objects such as money or material goods. However, the impact of choice on experiences, especially in the realm of affective touch, remains less explored. In this study, we specifically investigate whether choice can enhance the pleasure derived from affective touch, thereby increasing its intrinsic rewarding value. We conducted an experiment in which participants were being touched by an experimenter and asked to rate how pleasant their experience of touch was. They were given either a choice or no choice over certain touch stimulus variables which differed in their relevance: some were of low relevance (relating to the colour of the glove that the experimenter would use to touch them), while others were of high relevance (relating to the location on their arm where they would be stroked). Before and during touching, pupillometry was used to measure the level of arousal. We found that having a choice over aspects of tactile stimuli-especially those relevant to oneself-enhanced the pleasant perception of the touch. In addition, having a choice increases arousal in anticipation of touch. Regardless of how relevant it is to the actual tactile stimulus, allowing one to choose may positively enhance a person's perception of the physical contact they receive.

The Burden for High-Quality Online Data Collection Lies With Researchers, Not Recruitment Platforms.

A recent article in Perspectives on Psychological Science (Webb & Tangney, 2022) reported a study in which just 2.6% of participants recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) were deemed "valid." The authors highlighted some well-established limitations of MTurk, but their central claims-that MTurk is "too good to be true" and that it captured "only 14 human beings . . . [out of] N = 529"-are radically misleading, yet have been repeated widely. This commentary aims to (a) correct the record (i.e., by showing that Webb and Tangney's approach to data collection led to unusually low data quality) and (b) offer a shift in perspective for running high-quality studies online. Negative attitudes toward MTurk sometimes reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what the platform offers and how it should be used in research. Beyond pointing to research that details strategies for effective design and recruitment on MTurk, we stress that MTurk is not suitable for every study. Effective use requires specific expertise and design considerations. Like all tools used in research-from advanced hardware to specialist software-the tool itself places constraints on what one should use it for. Ultimately, high-quality data is the responsibility of the researcher, not the crowdsourcing platform.

Digital contact does not promote wellbeing, but face-to-face contact does: A cross-national survey during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With restricted face-to-face interactions, COVID-19 lockdowns and distancing measures tested the capability of computer-mediated communication to foster social contact and wellbeing. In a multinational sample (n = 6436), we investigated how different modes of contact related to wellbeing during the pandemic. Computer-mediated communication was more common than face-to-face, and its use was influenced by COVID-19 death rates, more so than state stringency measures. Despite its legal and health threats, face-to-face contact was still positively associated with wellbeing, and messaging apps had a negative association. Perceived household vulnerability to COVID-19 reduced the positive effect of face-to-face communication on wellbeing, but surprisingly, people's own vulnerability did not. Computer-mediated communication was particularly negatively associated with the wellbeing of young and empathetic people. Findings show people endeavored to remain socially connected, yet however, maintain a physical distance, despite the tangible costs to their wellbeing.

Delusion-like beliefs and data quality: Are classic cognitive biases artifacts of carelessness?

There is widespread agreement that delusions in clinical populations and delusion-like beliefs in the general population are, in part, caused by cognitive biases. Much of the evidence comes from two influential tasks: the Beads Task and the Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence Task. However, research using these tasks has been hampered by conceptual and empirical inconsistencies. In an online study, we examined relationships between delusion-like beliefs in the general population and cognitive biases associated with these tasks. Our study had four key strengths: A new animated Beads Task designed to reduce task miscomprehension, several data-quality checks to identify careless responders, a large sample (n = 1,002), and a preregistered analysis plan. When analyzing the full sample, our results replicated classic relationships between cognitive biases and delusion-like beliefs. However, when we removed 82 careless participants from the analyses (8.2% of the sample) we found that many of these relationships were severely diminished and, in some cases, eliminated outright. These results suggest that some (but not all) seemingly well-established relationships between cognitive biases and delusion-like beliefs might be artifacts of careless responding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Explanations in the wild.

Why do some explanations strike people as highly satisfying while others, seemingly equally accurate, satisfy them less? We asked laypeople to generate and rate thousands of open-ended explanations in response to 'Why?' questions spanning multiple domains, and analyzed the properties of these explanations to discover (1) what kinds of features are associated with greater explanation quality; (2) whether people can tell how good their explanations are; and (3) which cognitive traits predict the ability to generate good explanations. Our results support a pluralistic view of explanation, where satisfaction is best predicted by either functional or mechanistic content. Respondents were better able to judge how accurate their explanations were than how satisfying they were to others. Insight problem solving ability was the cognitive ability most strongly associated with the generation of satisfying explanations.

From Puzzle to Progress: How Engaging With Neurodiversity Can Improve Cognitive Science.

In cognitive science, there is a tacit norm that phenomena such as cultural variation or synaesthesia are worthy examples of cognitive diversity that contribute to a better understanding of cognition, but that other forms of cognitive diversity (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ADHD, and dyslexia) are primarily interesting only as examples of deficit, dysfunction, or impairment. This status quo is dehumanizing and holds back much-needed research. In contrast, the neurodiversity paradigm argues that such experiences are not necessarily deficits but rather are natural reflections of biodiversity. Here, we propose that neurodiversity is an important topic for future research in cognitive science. We discuss why cognitive science has thus far failed to engage with neurodiversity, why this gap presents both ethical and scientific challenges for the field, and, crucially, why cognitive science will produce better theories of human cognition if the field engages with neurodiversity in the same way that it values other forms of cognitive diversity. Doing so will not only empower marginalized researchers but will also present an opportunity for cognitive science to benefit from the unique contributions of neurodivergent researchers and communities.

Social alignment matters: Following pandemic guidelines is associated with better wellbeing.

BACKGROUND: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries implemented physical distancing measures. Many mental health experts warned that through increasing social isolation and anxiety, these measures could negatively affect psychosocial wellbeing. However, socially aligning with others by adhering to these measures may also be beneficial for wellbeing. METHODS: We examined these two contrasting hypotheses using cross-national survey data (N = 6675) collected fortnightly from participants in 115 countries over 3 months at the beginning of the pandemic. Participants reported their wellbeing, perceptions of how vulnerable they were to Covid-19 (i.e., high risk of infection) and how much they, and others in their social circle and country, were adhering to the distancing measures. RESULTS: Linear mixed-effects models showed that being a woman, having lower educational attainment, living alone and perceived high vulnerability to Covid-19 were risk factors for poorer wellbeing. Being young (18-25) was associated with lower wellbeing, but longitudinal analyses showed that young people's wellbeing improved over 3 months. In contrast to widespread views that physical distancing measures negatively affect wellbeing, results showed that following the guidelines was positively associated with wellbeing even for people in high-risk groups. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide an important counterpart to the idea that pandemic containment measures such as physical distancing negatively impacted wellbeing unequivocally. Despite the overall burden of the pandemic on psychosocial wellbeing, social alignment with others can still contribute to positive wellbeing. The pandemic has manifested our propensity to adapt to challenges, particularly highlighting how social alignment can forge resilience.

Caricatured facial movements enhance perception of emotional facial expressions.

Although faces "in the wild" constantly undergo complicated movements, humans adeptly perceive facial identity and expression. Previous studies, focusing mainly on identity, used photographic caricature to show that distinctive form increases perceived dissimilarity. We tested whether distinctive facial movements showed similar effects, and we focussed on both perception of expression and identity. We caricatured the movements of an animated computer head, using physical motion metrics extracted from videos. We verified that these "ground truth" metrics showed the expected effects: Caricature increased physical dissimilarity between faces differing in expression and those differing in identity. Like the ground truth dissimilarity, participants' dissimilarity perception was increased by caricature when faces differed in expression. We found these perceived dissimilarities to reflect the "representational geometry" of the ground truth. However, neither of these findings held for faces differing in identity. These findings replicated across two paradigms: pairwise ratings and multiarrangement. In a final study, motion caricature did not improve recognition memory for identity, whether manipulated at study or test. We report several forms of converging evidence for spatiotemporal caricature effects on dissimilarity perception of different expressions. However, more work needs to be done to discover what identity-specific movements can enhance face identification.

The Diversity Gap: When Diversity Matters for Knowledge.

Can diversity make for better science? Although diversity has ethical and political value, arguments for its epistemic value require a bridge between normative and mechanistic considerations, demonstrating why and how diversity benefits collective intelligence. However, a major hurdle is that the benefits themselves are rather mixed: Quantitative evidence from psychology and behavioral sciences sometimes shows a positive epistemic effect of diversity, but often shows a null effect, or even a negative effect. Here we argue that to make progress with these why and how questions, we need first to rethink when one ought to expect a benefit of cognitive diversity. In doing so, we highlight that the benefits of cognitive diversity are not equally distributed about collective intelligence tasks and are best seen for complex, multistage, creative problem solving, during problem posing and hypothesis generation. Throughout, we additionally outline a series of mechanisms relating diversity and problem complexity, and show how this perspective can inform metascience questions.

Collectively jumping to conclusions: Social information amplifies the tendency to gather insufficient data.

False beliefs can spread within societies even when they are costly and when individuals share access to the same objective reality. Research on the cultural evolution of misbeliefs has demonstrated that a social context can explain what people think but not whether it also explains how people think. We shift the focus from the diffusion of false beliefs to the diffusion of suboptimal belief-formation strategies and identify a novel mechanism whereby misbeliefs arise and spread. We show that, when individual decision makers have access to the data-gathering behavior of others, the tendency to make decisions on the basis of insufficient evidence is amplified, increasing the rate of incorrect, costly decisions. We argue that this mechanism fills a gap in current explanations of problematic, widespread misbeliefs such as climate change denial. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Social influence matters: We follow pandemic guidelines most when our close circle does.

Why do we adopt new rules, such as social distancing? Although human sciences research stresses the key role of social influence in behaviour change, most COVID-19 campaigns emphasize the disease's medical threat. In a global data set (n = 6,675), we investigated how social influences predict people's adherence to distancing rules during the pandemic. Bayesian regression analyses controlling for stringency of local measures showed that people distanced most when they thought their close social circle did. Such social influence mattered more than people thinking distancing was the right thing to do. People's adherence also aligned with their fellow citizens, but only if they felt deeply bonded with their country. Self-vulnerability to the disease predicted distancing more for people with larger social circles. Collective efficacy and collectivism also significantly predicted distancing. To achieve behavioural change during crises, policymakers must emphasize shared values and harness the social influence of close friends and family.

Face space representations of movement.

The challenging computational problem of perceiving dynamic faces "in the wild" goes unresolved because most research focuses on easier questions about static photograph perception. This literature conceptualizes face representation as a dissimilarity-based "face space", with axes that describe the dimensions of static images. Some versions express positions in face space relative to a central tendency (norm). Are facial movements represented like this? We tested for representations that accord with an a priori hypothesized motion-based face space by experimentally manipulating faces' motion-based dissimilarity. Because we caricatured movements, we could test for representations of dissimilarity from a motion-based norm. Behaviorally, participants perceived these caricatured expressions as convincing and recognizable. Moreover, as expected, caricature enhanced perceived dissimilarity between facial expressions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that occipitotemporal brain responses, including face-selective and motion-sensitive areas, reflect this face space. This evidence converged across methods including analysis of univariate mean responses (which additionally exhibited norm-based responses), repetition suppression and representational similarity analysis. This accumulated evidence for "representational geometry" shows how perception and visual brain responses to facial dynamics reflect representations of movement-based dissimilarity spaces, including explicit computation of distance from a norm movement.

Perspective taking in a novel signaling task: Effects of world knowledge and contextual constraint.

Perspective taking-the ability to see things from someone else's point of view-can boost success in communication. A signaler might take perspective when designing an utterance that is informative from the receiver's point of view, or the receiver might take perspective when inferring the signaler's communicative intentions. Perspective taking is supposed to play a particularly vital role when people try to communicate in the absence of a conventional signaling system. However, the task demands in such cases are extremely different from those in typical experimental approaches to perspective taking. Thus, current evidence for perspective taking does not establish whether humans can take perspective in those cases where perspective taking is arguably most helpful. We describe experimental tests of perspective taking that are suitable for settling the matter. Our task focuses on the use of shared world knowledge rather than shared visual scenes, and it is suitable for both open-ended and contextually constrained responses. We show that people generally fail at perspective taking in a novel signaling task, but that perspective taking can be boosted by contextual constraint. In that case, however, it is context, rather than perspective taking or shared world knowledge, that explains communicative success. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive mechanisms for inferring the meaning of novel signals during symbolisation.

As participants repeatedly interact using graphical signals (as in a game of Pictionary), the signals gradually shift from being iconic (or motivated) to being symbolic (or arbitrary). The aim here is to test experimentally whether this change in the form of the signal implies a concomitant shift in the inferential mechanisms needed to understand it. The results show that, during early, iconic stages, there is more reliance on creative inferential processes associated with insight problem solving, and that the recruitment of these cognitive mechanisms decreases over time. The variation in inferential mechanism is not predicted by the sign's visual complexity or iconicity, but by its familiarity, and by the complexity of the relevant mental representations. The discussion explores implications for pragmatics, language evolution, and iconicity research.