Context effects in cognitive effort evaluation.

When given a choice, people will avoid cognitively effortful courses of action because the experience of effort is evaluated as aversive and costly. At the same time, a body of work spanning psychology, economics, and neuroscience suggests that goods, actions, and experiences are often evaluated in the context in which they are encountered, rather in absolute terms. To probe the extent to which the evaluation of cognitive effort is also context-dependent, we had participants learn associations between unique stimuli and subjective demand levels across low-demand and high-demand contexts. We probed demand preferences and subjective evaluation using a forced-choice paradigm as well by examining effort ratings, taken both on-line (during learning) and off-line (after choice). When choosing between two stimuli objectively identical in terms of demand, participants showed a clear preference for the stimulus learned in the low- versus high-demand context and rated this stimulus as more subjectively effortful than the low-demand context in on-line but not off-line ratings, suggesting an assimilation effect. Finally, we observed that the extent to which individual participants who exhibited stronger assimilation effects in off-line demand ratings were more likely to manifest an assimilation effect in demand preferences. Broadly, our findings suggest that effort evaluations occur in a context-dependent manner and are specifically assimilated to the broader context in which they occur.

Variation in encoding context benefits item recognition.

The current study assesses whether varying the encoding context of a repeated event is a potential strategy to improve recognition memory across retrieval contexts. Context variability, also known as encoding variability, has historically been investigated primarily using recall and cued recall tasks, with the consensus being that encoding variability is not necessarily beneficial for episodic retrieval. However, recent studies (see text) suggest that test type may determine the strategy's effectiveness. Aligned with these recent findings, we found consistent benefits to simple item recognition when a word was studied in more variable contexts compared to less variable contexts across four experiments. This main effect of context variability occurred when crossed with a manipulation of repetition spacing and when crossed with a manipulation of encoding-retrieval context match. Variation in encoding contexts beyond the future retrieval context led to better item recognition than repeated study exposures within the future retrieval context. We argue that the current study and other recent findings indicate a need to re-evaluate the historical consensus on encoding variability as a beneficial strategy for learning.

What Environments Support Reading Growth Among Current Compared With Former Reading Intervention Recipients? A Multilevel Analysis of Students and Their Schools.

School context can shape relative intervention response in myriad ways due to factors, such as instructional quality, resource allocation, peer effects, and correlations between the school context and characteristics of enrolled students (e.g., higher-poverty students attending higher-poverty schools). In the current study, we used data from 16,000 Grade 3 students in a community-based supplemental reading intervention program to investigate the degree to which school context factors (percentage eligible for free/reduced-price lunch [FRPL], school-level achievement) relate to the differences in triannual reading fluency growth rates between students actively receiving supplemental intervention (active recipients) and those that formerly received intervention (and therefore only received general class instruction at this time; former recipients). Using Bayesian multilevel modeling, our findings indicate that school-level FRPL eligibility played a more prominent factor in growth rate differences between these two groups than school-level reading achievement. However, school-level reading achievement was much more strongly related to reading fluency differences between active and former intervention recipients at the beginning of the school year (when controlling for FRPL). Implications for investigating school-level heterogeneity in intervention response and sustainability are discussed.

Available and unavailable decoys in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) decision-making.

Decision-making has been observed to be systematically affected by decoys, i.e., options that should be irrelevant, either because unavailable or because manifestly inferior to other alternatives, and yet shift preferences towards their target. Decoy effects have been extensively studied both in humans and in several other species; however, evidence in non-human primates remains scant and inconclusive. To address this gap, this study investigates how choices in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) are affected by different types of decoys: asymmetrically dominated decoys, i.e., available and unavailable options that are inferior to only one of the other alternatives, and phantom decoys, i.e., unavailable options that are superior to another available alternative. After controlling for the subjective strength of initial preferences and the distance of each decoy from its target in attribute space, results demonstrate a systematic shift in capuchins' preference towards the target of both asymmetrically dominated decoys (whether they are available or not) and phantom decoys, regardless of what options is being targeted by such decoys. This provides the most comprehensive evidence to date of decoy effects in non-human primates, with important theoretical and methodological implications for future comparative studies on context effects in decision-making.

Uncovering the interplay between drawings, mental representations, and arithmetic problem-solving strategies in children and adults.

There is an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding the nature and role of the mental representations involved in solving arithmetic word problems. In this study, we took a closer look at the interplay between mental representations, drawing production, and strategy choice. We used dual-strategy isomorphic word problems sharing the same mathematical structure, but differing in the entities they mentioned in their problem statement. Due to the non-mathematical knowledge attached to these entities, some problems were believed to lead to a specific (cardinal) encoding compatible with one solving strategy, whereas other problems were thought to foster a different (ordinal) encoding compatible with the other solving strategy. We asked 59 children and 52 adults to solve 12 of those arithmetic word problems and to make a diagram of each problem. We hypothesized that the diagrams of both groups would display prototypical features indicating either a cardinal representation or an ordinal representation, depending on the entities mentioned in the problem statement. Joint analysis of the drawing task and the problem-solving task showed that the cardinal and ordinal features of the diagrams are linked with the hypothesized semantic properties of the problems and, crucially, with the choice of one solving strategy over another. We showed that regardless of their experience, participants' strategy use depends on their problem representation, which is influenced by the non-mathematical information in the problem statement, as revealed in their diagrams. We discuss the relevance of drawing tasks for investigating mental representations and fostering mathematical development in school.

Musical training is not associated with spectral context effects in instrument sound categorization.

Musicians display a variety of auditory perceptual benefits relative to people with little or no musical training; these benefits are collectively referred to as the "musician advantage." Importantly, musicians consistently outperform nonmusicians for tasks relating to pitch, but there are mixed reports as to musicians outperforming nonmusicians for timbre-related tasks. Due to their experience manipulating the timbre of their instrument or voice in performance, we hypothesized that musicians would be more sensitive to acoustic context effects stemming from the spectral changes in timbre across a musical context passage (played by a string quintet then filtered) and a target instrument sound (French horn or tenor saxophone; Experiment 1). Additionally, we investigated the role of a musician's primary instrument of instruction by recruiting French horn and tenor saxophone players to also complete this task (Experiment 2). Consistent with the musician advantage literature, musicians exhibited superior pitch discrimination to nonmusicians. Contrary to our main hypothesis, there was no difference between musicians and nonmusicians in how spectral context effects shaped instrument sound categorization. Thus, musicians may only outperform nonmusicians for some auditory skills relevant to music (e.g., pitch perception) but not others (e.g., timbre perception via spectral differences).

A fist bump in a political meeting? The influence of social context on affordance selection.

Historically, understanding human cognition such as action processing has been a challenging issue in cognitive neuropsychology and the more we know about cognition, the more we shape it as a complex, multi-determined phenomenon that is embedded in a social context. The present study aimed at understanding how the social context could influence affordance selection. We hypothesized that affordance selection would be modulated by social context and that a given hand configuration would be considered appropriate or not, as a function of the presence or absence of social context. Twenty-six healthy participants were asked to judge the appropriateness of three variants of 10 hand-object interactions based on photographs presented with or without a visual, social context. In our results, hand configurations were intrinsically acceptable or not, but this effect was modulated by the social context. A three-step model of the influence of social context on affordance selection was proposed, according to which selection depends on social norms, in the form of social knowledge and social context analysis.

Tracking the time-course of spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese in sentence context: Evidence from eye movements.

In this study, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the effects of sentence context and tonal information on spoken word recognition processes in Cantonese Chinese. We recruited 60 native Cantonese listeners to participate in the eye-tracking experiment. The target words (phonologically similar words) were manipulated to either (1) a congruent context or (2) an incongruent context in the experiment. The resulting eye-movement patterns in the incongruent context condition clearly revealed that (1) sentence context produced a garden-path effect in the initial stage of the spoken word recognition processes and then (2) the lexical tone of the word (bottom-up information) overrode the contextual effects to help listeners to discriminate between different similar-sounding words during lexical access. In conclusion, the patterns of eye-tracking data show the interactive processes between the lexical tone (an acoustic cue within a Cantonese word) and sentence context played in different phases to the spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese.

Backward masking implicates cortico-cortical recurrent processes in convex figure context effects and cortico-thalamic recurrent processes in resolving figure-ground ambiguity.

Introduction: Previous experiments purportedly showed that image-based factors like convexity were sufficient for figure assignment. Recently, however, we found that the probability of perceiving a figure on the convex side of a central border was only slightly higher than chance for two-region displays and increased with the number of display regions; this increase was observed only when the concave regions were homogeneously colored. These convex figure context effects (CEs) revealed that figure assignment in these classic displays entails more than a response to local convexity. A Bayesian observer replicated the convex figure CEs using both a convexity object prior and a new, homogeneous background prior and made the novel prediction that the classic displays in which both the convex and concave regions were homogeneous were ambiguous during perceptual organization. Methods: Here, we report three experiments investigating the proposed ambiguity and examining how the convex figure CEs unfold over time with an emphasis on whether they entail recurrent processing. Displays were shown for 100 ms followed by pattern masks after ISIs of 0, 50, or 100 ms. The masking conditions were designed to add noise to recurrent processing and therefore to delay the outcome of processes in which they play a role. In Exp. 1, participants viewed two- and eight-region displays with homogeneous convex regions (homo-convex displays; the putatively ambiguous displays). In Exp. 2, participants viewed putatively unambiguous hetero-convex displays. In Exp. 3, displays and masks were presented to different eyes, thereby delaying mask interference in the thalamus for up to 100 ms. Results and discussion: The results of Exps. 1 and 2 are consistent with the interpretation that recurrent processing is involved in generating the convex figure CEs and resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays. The results of Exp. 3 suggested that corticofugal recurrent processing is involved in resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays and that cortico-cortical recurrent processes play a role in generating convex figure CEs and these two types of recurrent processes operate in parallel. Our results add to evidence that perceptual organization evolves dynamically and reveal that stimuli that seem unambiguous can be ambiguous during perceptual organization.

No Support for Two Hypotheses About the Communicative Functions of Displaying Disgust: Evidence From Turkey, Norway, Germany, and Croatia.

In recent years, researchers have discovered much about how disgust works, its neural basis, its relationship with immune function, its connection with mating, and some of its antecedents and consequents. Despite these advances in our understanding, an under-explored area is how disgust may be used to serve a communicative function, including how individuals might strategically downplay or exaggerate the disgust display in front of different audiences. Here, we generated two hypotheses about potential communicative functions of disgust, and tested these hypotheses in four countries (Turkey, Croatia, Germany, and Norway). We found no evidence in support of either hypothesis in any country. Discussion focuses on the likely falsity of the two central hypotheses, alternative interpretations of our findings, and directions for future research.

A query theory account of the attraction effect.

We provide novel support for Query Theory, a reason-based decision framework, extending it to multialternative choices and applying it to the classic phenomenon known as the attraction effect. In Experiment 1 (N = 261), we generalised the two key metrics used in Query Theory from binary to multialternative choices and found that reasons supporting the target option were generated earlier and in greater quantity than those supporting the competitor, as predicted by the theory. In Experiment 2 (N = 703), we investigated the causal relationships between reasoning and choices by exogenously manipulating the order in which participants generated their reasons. As predicted, the size of the attraction effect was a function of this query order manipulation. We also introduced a bidirectional reason coding protocol to measure the valence of reasons, which confirmed support for Query Theory. We suggest the Query Theory framework can be useful for studying the high-level deliberation processes behind multialternative choices.

Measuring base-rate bias error in workplace safety investigators.

INTRODUCTION: This study explored the magnitude of professional industrial investigators' bias to attribute cause to a person more readily than to situational factors (i.e., human error bias). Such biased opinions may relieve companies from responsibilities and liability, as well as compromise efficacy of suggested preventative measures. METHOD: Professional investigators and undergraduate participants were given a summary of a workplace event and asked to allocate cause to the factors they found causal for the event. The summary was crafted to be objectively balanced in its implication of cause equally between two factors: a worker and a tire. Participants then rated their confidence and the objectivity of their judgment. We then conducted an effect size analysis, which supplemented the findings from our experiment with two previously published research studies that used the same event summary. RESULTS: Professionals exhibited a human error bias, but nevertheless believed that they were objective and confident in their conclusions. The lay control group also showed this human error bias. These data, along with previous research data, revealed that, given the equivalent investigative circumstances, this bias was significantly larger with the professional investigators, with an effect size of dunb = 0.97, than the control group with an effect size of only dunb = 0.32. CONCLUSIONS: The direction and strength of the human error bias can be quantified, and is shown to be larger in professional investigators compared to lay people. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: Understanding the strength and direction of bias is a crucial step in mitigating the effects of the bias. The results of the current research demonstrate that mitigation strategies such as proper investigator training, a strong investigation culture, and standardized techniques, are potentially promising interventions to mitigate human error bias.

The Temporal Dynamics of Stop Consonant Perception: Evidence from Context Effects.

Empirical evidence and theoretical models suggest that phonetic category perception involves two stages of auditory and phonetic processing. However, few studies examined the time course of these two processing stages. With brief stop consonant segments as context stimuli, this study examined the temporal dynamics of stop consonant perception by varying the inter-stimulus interval between context and target stimuli. The results suggest that phonetic category activation of stop consonants may appear before 100 ms of processing time. Furthermore, the activation of phonetic categories resulted in contrast context effects on identifying the target stop continuum; the auditory processing of stop consonants resulted in a different context effect from those caused by phonetic category activation. The findings provide further evidence for the two-stage model of speech perception and reveal the time course of auditory and phonetic processing.

Context-Aware Technology Mapping in Genetic Design Automation.

Genetic design automation (GDA) tools hold promise to speed-up circuit design in synthetic biology. Their widespread adoption is hampered by their limited predictive power, resulting in frequent deviations between the in silico and in vivo performance of a genetic circuit. Context effects, i.e., the change in overall circuit functioning, due to the intracellular environment of the host and due to cross-talk among circuits components are believed to be a major source for the aforementioned deviations. Incorporating these effects in computational models of GDA tools is challenging but is expected to boost their predictive power and hence their deployment. Using fine-grained thermodynamic models of promoter activity, we show in this work how to account for two major components of cellular context effects: (i) crosstalk due to limited specificity of used regulators and (ii) titration of circuit regulators to off-target binding sites on the host genome. We show how we can compensate the incurred increase in computational complexity through dedicated branch-and-bound techniques during the technology mapping process. Using the synthesis of several combinational logic circuits based on Cello's device library as a case study, we analyze the effect of different intensities and distributions of crosstalk on circuit performance and on the usability of a given device library.

Duration discrimination: A diffusion decision modeling approach.

The human ability to discriminate the duration of two subsequently presented stimuli is often studied with tasks that involve a comparison between a standard stimulus (with fixed duration) and comparison stimuli (with varying durations). The performance in such tasks is influenced by the presentation order of these successively presented stimuli. The so-called Type A effect refers to the impact of presentation order on the point of subjective equality. The Type B effect describes effects of presentation order on the just-noticeable-difference. Cognitive models that account for these context effects assume that participants' duration estimation is influenced by the history of previously encountered stimuli. For example, the internal reference model assumes that the magnitude of a "typical" stimulus is represented by an internal reference. This internal reference evolves throughout an experiment and is updated on every trial. Different recent models have in common that they describe how the internal reference is computed but are agnostic to the decision process itself. In this study, we develop a new model that incorporates the mechanisms of perceptual discrimination models into a diffusion model. The diffusion model focuses on the dynamics of the decision process itself and accounts for choice and response times based on a set of latent cognitive variables. We show that our model accurately predicts the accuracy and response time distribution in a classical duration discrimination task. Further, model parameters were sensitive to the Type A and B effect. The proposed model opens up new opportunities for studying human discrimination performance (e.g., individual differences).

The effect of preference learning on context effects in multi-alternative, multi-attribute choice.

Within the domain of preferential choice, it has long been thought that context effects, such as the attraction and compromise effects, arise due to the constructive nature of preferences and thus should not emerge when preferences are stable. We examined this hypothesis with a series of experiments where participants had the opportunity to experience selected alternatives and develop more enduring preferences. In our tasks, the options are presented in a description-based format so that participants need only learn their preferences for various options rather than the objective values of those options. Our results suggest that context effects can still emerge when stable preferences form through experience. This suggests that multi-alternative, multi-attribute decisions are likely influenced by relative evaluations, even when participants have the opportunity to experience options and learn their preferences. We hypothesize what was learned from experience in our tasks is the weights for various attributes. Through model simulations, we show that the observed choice patterns are well captured by a model with unequal attribute weights. A secondary finding is that the direction of observed context effects is opposite to standard effects and appears to be quite robust. Model simulations show that reserved effects can arise through various processes including representational noise and sensitivity to advantages and disadvantages when comparing options.

Health versus environmental benefits: Does additional information influence consumer acceptance of pulse-based spreads?

Despite the known health benefits and the potential for substituting less environmentally sustainable consumed foods such as meat, the current intake of pulses in developed countries remains less than recommended. Barriers are related to sensory characteristics and lack of knowledge about preparation, while drivers of environmental benefits are intangible. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of additional information about health or environmental benefits of pulses on the acceptance of novel pulse-based products from chickpeas, black beans, and faba beans. Perceptions of these pulse-based spreads in a blind and informed stage were assessed with 202 consumers in urban and suburban areas of Denmark. In general, the familiar chickpea spread followed by the relatively most unfamiliar black bean spread was liked the most. Only for these two products, additional information increased hedonic perception, regardless of the context (health or environmental benefits). If consumers did not like the spread, as found for the faba bean spread, providing additional information did not significantly alter this perception. Participants' preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) in a discrete choice experiment corresponded to hedonic scores, whereas providing additional information increased the WTP. These findings suggest that extrinsic cues such as health or environmental benefits may only be useful in products with an acceptable baseline taste profile. Moreover, black beans might be investigated as a promising source for further product development due to their acceptance by consumers besides being the comparably most unfamiliar pulse type.

Preferential Attraction Effects With Visual Stimuli: The Role of Quantitative Versus Qualitative Visual Attributes.

Offering an inferior and rarely chosen third (decoy) option to decision makers choosing between two options has a paradoxical effect: It increases the choice share of the option most similar to the decoy. This attraction effect is robust when options are numeric but rarely occurs in humans when options are visual, even though it occurs in animals. Building on psychophysics, we examined two types of visual attributes: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative visual attributes (e.g., different bottle volumes) can be perceived as magnitudes. Qualitative visual attributes (e.g., different colors), however, do not fall onto a magnitude scale. One can perceive that a bottle's volume is twice that of another bottle but not that a green bottle's color is twice that of a red bottle. We observed robust attraction effects for quantitative visual attributes (4,602 adults, 237 college-age participants), which reversed to repulsion effects when the visual attributes were qualitative (6,005 adults).

Aging and Emotion Regulation Tactics Across the Historical Events of 2020.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Despite well-documented cognitive and physical declines with age, older adults tend to report higher emotional well-being than younger adults, even during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To understand this paradox, as well as investigate the effects of specific historical contexts, the current study examined age differences in emotion regulation related to the events of 2020 in the United States. We predicted that, due to older adults' theorized greater prioritization of hedonic goals and avoidance of arousal, older adults would report more positivity-upregulation and acceptance tactics than younger adults. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Eighty-one younger adults (aged 18-25) and 85 older adults (age 55+) completed a retrospective survey on their emotion regulation tactic usage for 3 specific events: the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the killing of George Floyd, and the presidential election. RESULTS: Older adults tended to rely most on acceptance-focused tactics, while younger adults tended to rely on a more even variety of tactics. However, age differences in tactic preferences varied by event, possibly due to younger adults' greater emotion regulation flexibility. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Older adults' higher emotional well-being may not be primarily a result of age differences in positivity-related emotion regulation tactics but more about differences in acceptance use.

First impressions: Integrating faces and bodies in personality trait perception.

Faces and bodies spontaneously elicit personality trait judgments (e.g., trustworthy, dominant, lazy). We examined how trait information from the face and body combine to form first impressions of the whole person and whether trait judgments from the face and body are affected by seeing the whole person. Consistent with the trait-dependence hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed that the relative contribution of the face and body to whole-person perception varied with the trait judged. Agreeableness traits (e.g., warm, aggressive, sympathetic, trustworthy) were inferred primarily from the face, conscientiousness traits (e.g., dependable, careless) from the body, and extraversion traits (e.g., dominant, quiet, confident) from the whole person. A control experiment showed that both clothing and body shape contributed to whole-person judgments. In Experiment 2, we found that a face (body) rated in the whole person elicited a different rating than when it was rated in isolation. Specifically, when trait ratings differed for an isolated face and body of the same identity, the whole-person context biased in-context ratings of the faces and bodies towards the ratings of the context. These results showed that face and body trait perception interact more than previously assumed. We combine current and established findings to propose a novel framework to account for face-body integration in trait perception. This framework incorporates basic elements such as perceptual determinants, nonperceptual determinants, trait formation, and integration, as well as predictive factors such as the rater, the person rated, and the situation.