Verbal and pictorial single-item scales are as good as their 10-item counterparts for measuring perceived usability.

Single-item scales of perceived usability are attractive due to their efficiency and non-verbal scales are attractive because they enable collecting data from individuals irrespective of their language proficiency. We tested experimentally whether single-item verbal and pictorial scales can compete with their 10-item counterparts at reflecting the difference in usability between well-designed and poorly designed systems. N = 1079 (Experiment 1) and N = 1092 (Experiment 2) participants worked with two systems whose usability was experimentally manipulated. Perceived usability was assessed using the 10-item System Usability Scale, the single-item Adjective Rating Scale, the 10-item Pictorial System Usability Scale and the Pictorial Single-Item Usability Scale. The single-item scales reflect the difference in usability as good as their 10-item counterparts. The pictorial scales are nearly as valid as their verbal counterparts. The single-item Adjective Rating Scale and the Pictorial Single-Item Usability Scale are thus efficient and valid alternatives to their 10-item counterparts.

Verbal and pictorial single-item perceived-usability scales are viable alternatives to their 10-item counterparts. Specifically, the single-item Adjective Rating Scale is as good as the 10-item System Usability Scale and the Pictorial Single-Item Usability Scale is as good as the Pictorial System Usability Scale at reflecting differences in usability between systems.

Animacy enhances recollection but not familiarity: Convergent evidence from the remember-know-guess paradigm and the process-dissociation procedure.

Words representing living beings are better remembered than words representing nonliving objects, a robust finding called the animacy effect. Considering the postulated evolutionary-adaptive significance of this effect, the animate words' memory advantage should not only affect the quantity but also the quality of remembering. To test this assumption, we compared the quality of recognition memory between animate and inanimate words. The remember-know-guess paradigm (Experiment 1) and the process-dissociation procedure (Experiment 2) were used to assess both subjective and objective aspects of remembering. Based on proximate accounts of the animacy effect that focus on elaborative encoding and attention, animacy is expected to selectively enhance detailed recollection but not the acontextual feeling of familiarity. Multinomial processing-tree models were applied to disentangle recollection, familiarity, and different types of guessing processes. Results obtained from the remember-know-guess paradigm and the process-dissociation procedure convergently show that animacy selectively enhances recollection but does not affect familiarity. In both experiments, guessing processes were unaffected by the words' animacy status. Animacy thus not only enhances the quantity but also affects the quality of remembering: The effect is primarily driven by recollection. The results support the richness-of-encoding account and the attentional account of the animacy effect on memory.

The metacognition of auditory distraction: Judgments about the effects of deviating and changing auditory distractors on cognitive performance.

The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments about the disruptive effects of auditory-deviant, changing-state, and steady-state distractor sequences on serial recall. In a questionnaire, participants read about an irrelevant-speech experiment and were asked to provide metacognitive beliefs about how serial-recall performance would be affected by the different types of distractors. Another sample of participants heard the auditory distractors before predicting how their own serial-recall performance would suffer or benefit from the distractors. After participants had experienced the disruptive effects of the distractor sequences first hand, they were asked to make episodic retrospective judgments about how they thought the distractor sequences had affected their performance. The results consistently show that people are, on average, well aware of the greater disruptive effect of deviant and changing-state relative to steady-state distractors. Irrespective of condition, prospective and retrospective judgments of distraction were poor predictors of the individual susceptibility to distraction. These findings suggest that phenomena of auditory distraction cannot be categorized in two separate classes based on metacognitive awareness.

Do they really wash their hands? Prevalence estimates for personal hygiene behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic based on indirect questions.

BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people have to change their behaviours to slow down the spreading of the virus. Protective measures include self-isolation, social (physical) distancing and compliance with personal hygiene rules, particularly regular and thorough hand washing. Prevalence estimates for the compliance with the COVID-19 measures are often based on direct self-reports. However, during a health crisis there is strong public pressure to comply with health and safety regulations so that people's responding in direct self-reports may be seriously compromised by social desirability. METHODS: In an online survey, an indirect questioning technique was used to test whether the prevalence of hygiene practices may be lower than in conventional surveys when confidentiality of responding is guaranteed. The Extended Crosswise Model is an indirect questioning technique that guarantees the confidentiality of responding. To the degree that direct self-reports are biased by social desirability, prevalence estimates of hygiene practices such as thorough hand washing based on the Extended Crosswise Model should be lower than those based on direct self-reports. RESULTS: We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed. CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that estimates of the degree of commitment to measures designed to counter the spread of the disease may be significantly inflated by social desirability in direct self-reports. Indirect questioning techniques with higher levels of confidentiality seem helpful in obtaining more realistic estimates of the degree to which people follow the recommended personal hygiene measures. More realistic estimates of compliance can help to inform and to adjust public information campaigns on COVID-19 hygiene recommendations.

Monetary incentives have only limited effects on auditory distraction: evidence for the automaticity of cross-modal attention capture.

The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction postulates that two distinct forms of auditory distraction can be distinguished by whether or not they can be cognitively controlled. While the interference-by-process component of auditory distraction is postulated to be automatic and independent of cognitive control, the stimulus-aspecific attention capture by auditory deviants and the stimulus-specific attentional diversion by auditorily presented distractor sentences should be suppressed by increased task engagement. Here we test whether incentive-induced changes in task engagement affect the disruption of serial recall by auditory deviants (Experiment 1) and distractor sentences (Experiment 2). Monetary incentives substantially affected recall performance in both experiments. However, the incentive-induced changes in task engagement had only limited effects on auditory distraction. In Experiment 2, increased task engagement was associated with a small decrease of distraction relative to a quiet condition, but strong effects of auditory distraction on performance persisted in conditions of high task engagement in both experiments. Most importantly, and in contrast to the predictions of the duplex-mechanism account, the effects of stimulus-aspecific attention capture (Experiment 1) and stimulus-specific attentional diversion (Experiment 2) remained unaffected by incentive-induced changes in task engagement. These findings are consistent with an automatic-capture account according to which only the processes responsible for the deliberate memorization of the target items are dependent on controlled mental effort while the attention capture by auditory deviants and the attentional diversion by distractor speech are largely automatic.

Source memory for advertisements: The role of advertising message credibility.

Advertising is seen as an untrustworthy source because of the perceived self-interest of the advertisers in presenting product information in a biased or misleading way. Regulations require advertising messages in print and online media to be labeled as advertisements to allow recipients to take source information into account when judging the credibility of the messages. To date, little is known about how these source tags are remembered. Research within the source-monitoring framework suggests that source attributions are not only based on veridical source memory but are often reconstructed through schematic guessing. In two experiments, we examined how the credibility of advertising messages affects these source attribution processes. The source of the messages affected judgments of credibility at the time of encoding, but the source tags were forgotten after a short period of time. Retrospective source attributions in the absence of memory for the source tags were strongly influenced by the a priori credibility of the messages: Statements with a low a priori credibility were more likely to be (mis)attributed to advertising than statements with high a priori credibility. These findings suggest that the mere labeling of untrustworthy sources is of limited use because source information is quickly forgotten and memory-based source attributions are strongly biased by schematic influences.

Memory and metamemory for social interactions: Evidence for a metamemory expectancy illusion.

People do not always have accurate metacognitive awareness of the conditions that lead to good source memory. In Experiment 1, participants studied words referring to bathroom and kitchen items that were either paired with an expected or unexpected room as the source. Participants provided judgments of item and source learning after each item-source pair. In line with previous studies, participants incorrectly predicted their memory to be better for expected than for unexpected sources. Here, we show that this metamemory expectancy illusion generalizes to socially relevant stimuli. In Experiment 2, participants played a prisoner's dilemma game with trustworthy-looking and untrustworthy-looking partners who either cooperated or cheated. After each round of the game, participants provided metamemory judgments about how well they were going to remember the partner's face and behavior. On average, participants predicted their source memory to be better for behaviors that were expected based on the facial appearances of the partners. This stands in contrast to the established finding that veridical source memory is better for unexpected than expected information. Asking participants to provide metamemory judgments at encoding selectively enhanced source memory for the expected information. These results are consistent with how schematic expectations affect source memory and metamemory for nonsocial information, suggesting that both are governed by general rather than by domain-specific principles. Differences between experiments may be linked to the fact that people may have special beliefs about memory for social stimuli, such as the belief that cheaters are particularly memorable (Experiment 3).

Guess what? Different source-guessing strategies for old versus new information.

The probability-matching account states that learned specific episodic contingencies of item types and source dominate over general schematic expectations in source guessing. However, recent evidence from Bell et al. [(2020). Source attributions for detected new items: Persistent evidence for schematic guessing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(9), 1407-1422] suggest that this only applies to source guessing for information that is recognised as belonging to a previously encoded episode. When information was detected as being new, participants persisted in applying schematic knowledge about the sources' profession. This dissociation in source guessing for detected-old and detected-new information may have been fostered by the specific source-monitoring paradigm by Bell et al. (2020) in which sources were a group of individuals in a certain profession rather than fixed persons from that profession for whom episodic contingencies are more likely to persist also for new information. The aim of the present study was to test whether source guessing for detected-old versus detected-new information also dissociates in a more typical source-monitoring task, the doctor-lawyer paradigm, in which one individual doctor and one lawyer present profession-related information. Despite this change in paradigm, source guessing was based on the item-source contingency only for detected-old information, whereas schematic knowledge persisted for detected-new information. The present study thus adds evidence for persistent schema-based source guessing for new information.

Adaptive memory: enhanced source memory for animate entities.

The animacy effect refers to enhanced memory for animate over inanimate items. In two studies, we examined whether this memory advantage generalises to source memory. A multinomial processing tree model was used to disentangle item recognition, source memory, and guessing processes. In Study 1, animate and inanimate words were presented at different spatial locations on the screen. Animacy was associated with enhanced source memory for the spatial locations of the items. In Study 2, pseudowords were associated with animate and inanimate properties. Replicating previous results, the pseudowords were better remembered when they were associated with animate properties than when they were associated with inanimate properties. What is more, participants had enhanced source memory for the association between the pseudowords and the animate properties. The results strengthen the idea that animate items are associated with richer mnemonic representations than inanimate items.

Equivalent auditory distraction in children and adults.

There is an ongoing debate about whether children have more problems ignoring auditory distractors than adults. This is an important empirical question with direct implications for theories making predictions about the development of selective attention. In two experiments, the disruptive effect of to-be-ignored speech on short-term memory performance of third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, younger adults, and older adults was examined. Three auditory conditions were compared: (a) steady state sequences in which the same distractor was repeated, (b) changing state sequences in which different distractors were presented, and (c) auditory deviant sequences in which a deviant distractor was presented in a sequence of repeated distractors. According to the attentional resource view, children should exhibit larger disruption by changing and deviant sounds due to their poorer attentional control abilities compared with adults. The duplex-mechanism account proposes that the auditory deviant effect is under attentional control, whereas the changing state effect is not, and thus predicts that children should be more susceptible to auditory deviants than adults but equally disrupted by changing state sequences. According to the renewed view of age-related distraction, there should be no age differences in cross-modal auditory distraction because some of the irrelevant auditory information can be filtered out early in the processing stream. Children and adults were equally disrupted by changing and deviant speech sounds regardless of whether task difficulty was equated between age groups or not. These results are consistent with the renewed view of age-related distraction.

The implicit cognition of reciprocal exchange: automatic retrieval of positive and negative experiences with partners in a prisoner's dilemma game.

Models of reciprocity imply that cheater detection is an important prerequisite for successful social exchange. Considering the fundamental role of memory in reciprocal exchange, these theories lead to the prediction that memory for cheaters should be preferentially enhanced. Here, we examine whether information of a partner's previous behaviour in an interaction is automatically retrieved when encountering the face of a partner who previously cheated or cooperated. In two studies, participants played a sequential prisoner's dilemma game with cheaters and cooperative partners. Alternating with the game blocks, participants were asked to classify the smiling or angry facial expressions of cooperators and cheaters. Both experiments revealed congruence effects, reflecting faster identification of the smiles of cooperators (Experiments 1 and 2) and faster identification of the angry facial expressions of cheaters (Experiment 2). Our study provides evidence for the automatic retrieval of the partner's behaviour in the game, regardless of whether partners cheated or cooperated, and thus provides further evidence against the cheater detection hypothesis.

Memory and disgust: Effects of appearance-congruent and appearance-incongruent information on source memory for food.

The present study was stimulated by previous findings showing that people preferentially remember person descriptions that violate appearance-based first impressions. Given that until now all studies used faces as stimuli, these findings can be explained by referring to a content-specific module for social information processing that facilitates social orientation within groups via stereotyping and counter-stereotyping. The present study tests whether the same results can be obtained with fitness-relevant stimuli from another domain--pictures of disgusting-looking or tasty-looking food, paired with tasty and disgusting descriptions. A multinomial model was used to disentangle item memory, guessing and source memory. There was an old-new recognition advantage for disgusting-looking food. People had a strong tendency towards guessing that disgusting-looking food had been previously associated with a disgusting description. Source memory was enhanced for descriptions that disconfirmed these negative, appearance-based impressions. These findings parallel the results from the social domain. Heuristic processing of stimuli based on visual appearance may be complemented by intensified processing of incongruent information that invalidates these first impressions.

Evidence for habituation of the irrelevant-sound effect on serial recall.

Working memory theories make opposing predictions as to whether the disruptive effect of task-irrelevant sound on serial recall should be attenuated after repeated exposure to the auditory distractors. Although evidence of habituation has emerged after a passive listening phase, previous attempts to observe habituation to to-be ignored distractors on a trial-by-trial basis have proven to be fruitless. With the present study, we suggest that habituation to auditory distractors occurs, but has often been overlooked because past attempts to measure habituation in the irrelevant-sound paradigm were not sensitive enough. In a series of four experiments, the disruptive effects of to-be-ignored speech and music relative to a quiet control condition were markedly reduced after eight repetitions, regardless of whether trials were presented in blocks (Exp. 1) or in a random order (Exp. 2). The auditory distractor's playback direction (forward, backward) had no effect (Exp. 3). The same results were obtained when the auditory distractors were only presented in a retention interval after the presentation of the to-be-remembered items (Exp. 4). This pattern is only consistent with theoretical accounts that allow for attentional processes to interfere with the maintenance of information in working memory.

Please silence your cell phone: Your ringtone captures other people's attention.

Ringtones are designed to draw attention away from on-going activities. In the present study, it was investigated whether the disruptive effects of a ringing cell phone on short-term memory are inevitable or become smaller as a function of exposure and whether (self-) relevance plays a role. Participants performed a serial recall task either in silence or while task-irrelevant ringtones were presented. Performance was worse when a ringing phone had to be ignored, but gradually recovered compared with the quiet control condition with repeated presentation of the distractor sound. Whether the participant's own ringtone was played or that of a yoked-control partner did not affect performance and habituation rate. The results offer insight into auditory distraction by highly attention-demanding distractors and recovery therefrom. Implications for work environments and other applied settings are discussed.

Remembering the truth or falsity of advertising claims: A preregistered model-based test of three competing theoretical accounts.

Given the large amount of information that people process daily, it is important to understand memory for the truth and falsity of information. The most prominent theoretical models in this regard are the Cartesian model and the Spinozan model. The former assumes that both "true" and "false" tags may be added to the memory representation of encoded information; the latter assumes that only falsity is tagged. In the present work, we contrasted these two models with an expectation-violation model hypothesizing that truth or falsity tags are assigned when expectations about truth or falsity must be revised in light of new information. An interesting implication of the expectation-violation model is that a context with predominantly false information leads to the tagging of truth whereas a context with predominantly true information leads to the tagging of falsity. To test the three theoretical models against each other, veracity expectations were manipulated between participants by varying the base rates of allegedly true and false advertising claims. Memory for the veracity of these claims was assessed using a model-based analysis. To increase methodological rigor and transparency in the specification of the measurement model, we preregistered, a priori, the details of the model-based analysis test. Despite a large sample size (N = 208), memory for truth and falsity did not differ, regardless of the base rates of true and false claims. The results thus support the Cartesian model and provide evidence against the Spinozan model and the expectation-violation model.

Manipulations of richness of encoding do not modulate the animacy effect on memory.

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate participants to generate more ideas than inanimate words at encoding. These ideas may later serve as retrieval cues and thus enhance recall. There is as yet only correlational evidence associating rich encoding and the animacy advantage in memory. To experimentally test the assumption that richness of encoding plays a causal role, we examined whether the animacy effect can be modulated by facilitating or suppressing rich encoding. In Experiment 1, richness of encoding was manipulated by requiring participants to write down four ideas or one idea in response to animate and inanimate words. In Experiment 2, the one-idea-generation condition was compared to an unrestricted-idea-generation condition. In Experiment 3, the unrestricted-idea-generation condition was compared to a distractor-task condition in which the idea-generation process was suppressed. In Experiment 4, richness of encoding was manipulated by asking participants to rate the relevance of the words for achieving three survival-related goals or one survival-related goal. Animate words were better remembered than inanimate words. In three of the four experiments, rich encoding led to improved recall. However, none of the manipulations of richness of encoding affected the animacy effect on memory, demonstrating its robustness irrespective of the encoding conditions. These results weaken the richness-of-encoding account of the animacy effect on memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Time pressure and deliberation affect moral punishment.

The deliberate-morality account implies that moral punishment should be decreased with time pressure and increased with deliberation while the intuitive-morality account predicts the opposite. In three experiments, moral punishment was examined in a simultaneous one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. The players cooperated or defected and then decided whether or not to punish their partners. In Experiment 1, the punishment decisions were made without or with time pressure. In Experiment 2, the punishment decisions were immediate or delayed by pauses in which participants deliberated their decisions. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to deliberate self-interest or fairness before deciding whether to punish their partners. Different types of punishment were distinguished using the cooperation-and-punishment model. In Experiment 1, time pressure decreased moral punishment. In Experiment 2, deliberation increased moral punishment. So far, the evidence supports the deliberate-morality account. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the effect of deliberation depends on what is deliberated. When participants deliberated self-interest rather than fairness, moral punishment was decreased. The results suggest that unguided deliberation increases moral punishment, but the effects of deliberation are modulated by the type of deliberation that takes place. These results strengthen a process-based account of punishment which offers a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific effect of deliberation on moral punishment than the deliberate-morality account.

On the advantages of using AI-generated images of filler faces for creating fair lineups.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) enable the generation of realistic facial images that can be used in police lineups. The use of AI image generation offers pragmatic advantages in that it allows practitioners to generate filler images directly from the description of the culprit using text-to-image generation, avoids the violation of identity rights of natural persons who are not suspects and eliminates the constraints of being bound to a database with a limited set of photographs. However, the risk exists that using AI-generated filler images provokes more biased selection of the suspect if eyewitnesses are able to distinguish AI-generated filler images from the photograph of the suspect's face. Using a model-based analysis, we compared biased suspect selection directly between lineups with AI-generated filler images and lineups with database-derived filler photographs. The results show that the lineups with AI-generated filler images were perfectly fair and, in fact, led to less biased suspect selection than the lineups with database-derived filler photographs used in previous experiments. These results are encouraging with regard to the potential of AI image generation for constructing fair lineups which should inspire more systematic research on the feasibility of adopting AI technology in forensic settings.

People punish defection, not failures to conform to the majority.

Do people punish others for defecting or for failing to conform to the majority? In two experiments, we manipulated whether the participants' partners cooperated or defected in the majority of the trials of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. The effects of this base-rate manipulation on cooperation and punishment were assessed using a multinomial processing tree model. High compared to low cooperation rates of the partners increased participants' cooperation. When participants' cooperation was not enforced through partner punishment, the participants' cooperation was closely aligned to the cooperation rates of the partners. Moral punishment of defection increased when cooperation rates were high compared to when defection rates were high. However, antisocial punishment of cooperation when defection rates were high was much less likely than moral punishment of defection when cooperation rates were high. In addition, antisocial punishment was increased when cooperation rates were high compared to when defection rates were high. The latter two results contradict the assumption that people punish conformity-violating behavior regardless of whether the behavior supports or disrupts cooperation. Punishment is thus sensitive to the rates of cooperation and defection but, overall, the results are inconsistent with the idea that punishment primarily, let alone exclusively, serves to enforce conformity with the majority.

Evidence of a metacognitive illusion in stimulus-specific prospective judgments of distraction by background speech.

Two experiments served to examine how people arrive at stimulus-specific prospective judgments about the distracting effects of speech on cognitive performance. The direct-access account implies that people have direct metacognitive access to the cognitive effects of sounds that determine distraction. The processing-fluency account implies that people rely on the processing-fluency heuristic to predict the distracting effects of sounds on cognitive performance. To test these accounts against each other, we manipulated the processing fluency of speech by playing speech forward or backward and by playing speech in the participants' native or a foreign language. Forward speech and native speech disrupted serial recall to the same degree as backward speech and foreign speech, respectively. However, the more fluently experienced forward speech and native speech were incorrectly predicted to be less distracting than backward speech and foreign speech. This provides evidence of a metacognitive illusion in stimulus-specific prospective judgments of distraction by speech, supporting the processing-fluency account over the direct-access account. The difference between more and less fluently experienced speech was largely absent in the participants' global retrospective judgments of distraction, suggesting that people gain access to comparatively valid cues when experiencing the distracting effects of speech on their serial-recall performance firsthand.