Exploring sex differences in auditory saliency: the role of acoustic characteristics in bottom-up attention.

BACKGROUND: Several cognitive functions are related to sex. However, the relationship between auditory attention and sex remains unclear. The present study aimed to explore sex differences in auditory saliency judgments, with a particular focus on bottom-up type auditory attention. METHODS: Forty-five typical adults (mean age: 21.5 ± 0.64 years) with no known hearing deficits, intelligence abnormalities, or attention deficits were enrolled in this study. They were tasked with annotating attention capturing sounds from five audio clips played in a soundproof room. Each stimulus contained ten salient sounds randomly placed within a 1-min natural soundscape. We conducted a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) analysis using the number of responses to salient sounds as the dependent variable, sex as the between-subjects factor, duration, maximum loudness, and maximum spectrum of each sound as the within-subjects factor, and each sound event and participant as the variable effect. RESULTS: No significant differences were found between male and female groups in age, hearing threshold, intellectual function, and attention function (all p > 0.05). Analysis confirmed 77 distinct sound events, with individual response rates of 4.0-100%. In a GLMM analysis, the main effect of sex was not statistically significant (p = 0.458). Duration and spectrum had a significant effect on response rate (p = 0.006 and p < 0.001). The effect of loudness was not statistically significant (p = 0.13). CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that male and female listeners do not differ significantly in their auditory saliency judgments based on the acoustic characteristics studied. This finding challenges the notion of inherent sex differences in bottom-up auditory attention and highlights the need for further research to explore other potential factors or conditions under which such differences might emerge.

Increased intra-individual variability among individuals with ADHD: first evidence from numerosity judgment and verbal and quantitative reasoning.

BACKGROUND: This article presents the results of two studies investigating increased intra-individual variability (IIV) in the performance of individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), in two cognitive domains: numerosity judgments and quantitative and verbal reasoning. METHODS: Study 1, a pre-registered experiment, involved approximately 200 participants (42.66% female; mean age: 36.86; standard deviation of age: 10.70) making numerical judgments at two time-points. ADHD-symptom severity was assessed on a continuous scale. In Study 2, we collected the data of approximately 3000 examinees who had taken a high-stakes admissions test for higher education (assessing quantitative and verbal reasoning). The sample comprised only people formally diagnosed with ADHD. The control group consisted of approximately 200 000 examinees, none of whom presented with ADHD. RESULTS: The results of Study 1 revealed a positive correlation between IIV (distance between judgments at the two time-points) and ADHD symptom severity. The results of Study 2 demonstrated that IIV (distance between the scores on two test chapters assessing the same type of reasoning) was greater among examinees diagnosed with ADHD. In both studies, the findings persisted even after controlling for performance level. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that individuals with ADHD, v. those without, exhibit less consistent numerosity judgments and greater fluctuation in performance on verbal and quantitative reasoning. The measurement of the same psychological constructs appears to be less precise among individuals with ADHD compared to those without. We discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications of our results for two fields: judgment and decision-making, and assessment.

Transitioning from specialisation to collaboration: interprofessional clinical simulation, metacognition and the phenomenon of convergence.

Research into metacognitive processes within interprofessional clinical simulation has been largely overlooked in the literature. This study explores how interprofessional simulation may influence cognitive and metacognitive processes across several professional programmes; medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and occupational therapy. This study focused on changes in performance pre- and post-simulation, with undergraduate students from each profession answering a set of questions related to the simulation case, requiring specialized knowledge from each profession. Question scores, item confidence judgment ratings, and calibration values were collected and analyzed. The data revealed a pattern of convergence in post-simulation assessments, where professions initially with lower performance in the pre-simulation phase improved, and those initially performing well demonstrating a decline in performance. Calibration values indicated that medical students developed metacognitive errors from their interactions in the simulation, which were not present pre-simulation, and that occupational therapy students suffered a loss of confidence and calibration in questions within their own field resulting from their experience (being more accurate pre-simulation). The authors anticipate that the phenomenon of convergence may have longer-term consequences, potentially fostering distrust among professions for those with declining performance. The authors propose that expanding awareness of convergence phenomena and conducting repeated simulations (thus facilitating further team development) could mitigate this issue.

People's judgments of humans and robots in a classic moral dilemma.

How do ordinary people evaluate robots that make morally significant decisions? Previous work has found both equal and different evaluations, and different ones in either direction. In 13 studies (N = 7670), we asked people to evaluate humans and robots that make decisions in norm conflicts (variants of the classic trolley dilemma). We examined several conditions that may influence whether moral evaluations of human and robot agents are the same or different: the type of moral judgment (norms vs. blame); the structure of the dilemma (side effect vs. means-end); salience of particular information (victim, outcome); culture (Japan vs. US); and encouraged empathy. Norms for humans and robots are broadly similar, but blame judgments show a robust asymmetry under one condition: Humans are blamed less than robots specifically for inaction decisions-here, refraining from sacrificing one person for the good of many. This asymmetry may emerge because people appreciate that the human faces an impossible decision and deserves mitigated blame for inaction; when evaluating a robot, such appreciation appears to be lacking. However, our evidence for this explanation is mixed. We discuss alternative explanations and offer methodological guidance for future work into people's moral judgment of robots and humans.

Unmasking Moral Hypocrisy: How Preschoolers Perceive and Judge Moral Hypocrites.

Many previous studies indicate that children are highly sensitive to the immoral behavior of others, preferring prosocial over antisocial characters. Accordingly, children avoid transgressors from a very early age. A special kind of transgressor is the moral hypocrite, who not only acts immorally but also acts in contrast to what they preach. There are very few studies establishing whether children recognize moral hypocrisy and if it impacts their moral judgment. We ran three studies with preschoolers aged 4 to 6 years on whether children recognize moral hypocrisy and how children assess moral hypocrisy. In Studies 2 and 3, we also tested false-signaling theory as an explanation of the more negative assessments of moral hypocrites. In Study 1 (N = 133), we showed that children indeed assess moral hypocrites more negatively than nonhypocritical moral transgressors. In Study 2 (N = 115), we initially demonstrated that the assessment of moral hypocrites results from their inconsistency between words and deeds. Study 3 (N = 159) replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 and, by excluding an alternative explanation, explained that moral hypocrites are perceived as less moral and liked less due to the false signals that they send.

A beautiful face is good when we're judged by others, a moral character is better.

Moral beauty, reflected in one's actions, and facial beauty both affect how we're judged. Here, we investigated how moral and facial beauty interactively affect social judgments and emotional responses, employing event-related brain potentials. Participants (all female) associated positive, neutral, or negative verbal information with faces scoring high or low on attractiveness and performed ratings of the faces as manipulation checks. In a separate test phase, the faces were presented again, and participants made valenced social judgments of the persons. Results show a dominance of moral beauty in valenced social judgments as well as ERPs related to reflexive and evaluative emotional responses (early posterior negativity, EPN, late positive potential, LPP), whereas facial attractiveness mattered little. In contrast, facial attractiveness affected visual processing (N170). Similarly, relatively shallow impressions of attractiveness and likability that require no knowledge about the person were influenced by both facial attractiveness and social-emotional information. This pattern of dominant effects of social-emotional information regardless of attractiveness shows that when it comes to our emotional responses and social judgments, moral beauty is what matters most, even in the face of physical beauty.

Judgments of learning reactively affect memory by inducing covert retrieval.

Making judgments of learning (JOLs) can directly influence memory, a phenomenon termed the reactivity effect of JOLs. However, controversy surrounds the mechanism behind JOL reactivity. This study employs related and unrelated word pairs as learning materials to compare memory outcomes across different JOL conditions. We contrasted the traditional JOL reactivity paradigm with a covert retrieval induction paradigm to explore whether JOLs impact memory through covert retrieval. In Experiment 1, data from 40 participants (18 females, 22 males) were analyzed, revealed distinct patterns between the two paradigms. When word pairs are presented entirely, the JOL group outperforms the no-JOL group in memorizing related pairs, aligning with traditional JOL reactivity. Conversely, when target words are omitted, the JOL group's memory resembles that of the no-JOL group. This comparison suggested that JOLs may prompt covert retrieval. In Experiment 2, which involved manipulating the retrieval strength, data from 52 participants (46 females, 6 males) were analyzed, yielded results consistent with those of Experiment 1. We conclude that covert retrieval significantly contributes to the JOL reactivity effect, enhancing memory through JOL-induced covert retrieval.

Can written prompts help medical residents to accurately monitor their own communication skills and those of others?

In healthcare, effective communication in complex situations such as end of life conversations is critical for delivering high quality care. Whether residents learn from communication training with actors depends on whether they are able to select appropriate information or 'predictive cues' from that learning situation that accurately reflect their or their peers' performance and whether they use those cues for ensuing judgement. This study aimed to explore whether prompts can help medical residents improving use of predictive cues and judgement of communication skills. First and third year Kenyan residents (N = 41) from 8 different specialties were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups during a mock OSCE assessing advanced communication skills. Residents in the intervention arm received paper predictive cue prompts while residents in the control arm received paper regular prompts for self-judgement. In a pre- and post- test, residents' use of predictive cues and the appropriateness of peer-judgements were evaluated against a pre-rated video of another resident. The intervention improved both the use of predictive cues in self-judgement and peer-judgement. Ensuing accuracy of peer-judgements in the pre- to post-test only partly improved: no effect from the intervention was found on overall appropriateness of judgements. However, when analyzing participants' completeness of judgements over the various themes within the consultation, a reduction in inappropriate judgments scores was seen in the intervention group. In conclusion, predictive cue prompts can help learners to concentrate on relevant cues when evaluating communication skills and partly improve monitoring accuracy. Future research should focus on offering prompts more frequently to evaluate whether this increases the effect on monitoring accuracy in communication skills.

The Self-Reference Effect in Metamemory and the Role of Beliefs in This Process.

Previous research has shown a clear self-reference effect in our memory. However, the question arises as to whether this effect could extend to higher cognitive domains such as metamemory. Thus, this study examined the effects of different encoding types on judgments of learning (JOLs) and explored the role of beliefs in this process. A one-way (encoding type: semantic, self-referential) within-participants design was employed in Experiment 1, which found no self-reference effect in JOLs. In Experiment 2, we manipulated participants' beliefs to explore their effect on JOLs under different encoding strategies. The results showed that learners' metamemory beliefs about encoding types influence JOLs. Learners who believed that self-referential and semantic encoding had the same memory effect tended to give equal JOLs to both words. However, learners who believed that self-referential encoding had a better memory effect than semantic encoding gave higher JOLs to self-referentially encoded words. The conclusions are as follows: There is no self-reference effect in JOLs, but learners' metamemory beliefs about encoding types influence JOLs.

Varieties of pictorial vision.

Pictorial awareness is addressed through experimental phenomenology involving over 90 naïve participants. Since one can't look at the "same" picture twice the study uses one-shot trials. The participant's fascination for the duration of a session is held through the artistic principle of theme and variation. Six variations focus on the theme of pictorial geometry, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Major findings are: Idiosyncratic deviations from veridical are huge as compared to common textbook "effects." Observers wield arbitrary heuristics for tasks that are "formally related." The assumption of a common formal framework is apparently unsound. The notion of "inverse optics" is misleading. A fair fraction of the population appears to lack monocular stereopsis as intuitive awareness. It suggests an as-yet unrecognized, but perhaps common variety of aphantasia.

Metamemory judgments and design effects: Judgment of learning (JOL) reactivity in free recall is affected by study list structure.

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are designed to reveal processes of memory monitoring but recent research has shown that JOLs can also have reactive effects on memory performance. A recently proposed account for JOL reactivity is based on the item-specific/relational framework, a general account of memory encoding that has been applied to a wide range of memory phenomena. Importantly, the effects of these phenomena on free recall performance are generally moderated by list composition: the effects are stronger in mixed than pure list manipulations - that is, these phenomena exhibit design effects. Applied to JOL reactivity, the item-specific/relational account likewise predicts design effects. Specifically, the account predicts that JOL reactivity should be more positive in mixed compared to pure lists. In three experiments, judgment condition (JOL vs. no JOL) and list type (mixed vs. pure) were manipulated and memory assessed with free recall. As hypothesized, JOL reactivity was consistently more positive in mixed than pure lists, a result found with related word pairs (Experiment 1), unrelated word pairs (Experiment 2), and lists of single words (Experiment 3). Overall, JOL reactivity demonstrates design effects, a result which provides support for the item-specific/relational account of JOL reactivity.

Understanding Social Judgments of and Proclivities to Commit Upskirting.

Against a backdrop of legislative change that sees the taking of private sexual images underneath the clothing of a non-consenting other being made a criminal offence - upskirting - there is a need to understand the public's judgments of and motivations to perpetrate said behavior. In this study (N = 490), we investigated whether judgments of upskirting differed as a function of the sex of the person who was upskirted (male, female) and their perceived attractiveness (attractive, unattractive), as well as how variation in voyeuristic interest, belief in a just world, and dark personality traits predicted judgments of and proclivity to engage in upskirting. We consistently observed more lenient judgments of upskirting behavior when the person who was upskirted was attractive and male, with such judgements predicted by older age across all conditions. Moreover, proclivity to engage in upskirting was predicted by past voyeuristic behaviors, higher psychopathic personality, and being male and of older age. We discuss our findings in the context of needing to qualitatively understand the rationale underpinning these judgments, combating barriers to disclose victimization, and practitioner implications.

Public value judgments about the criteria for reimbursement of medicines in South Korea.

OBJECTIVES: This study quantified the public value (PV) of the criteria and sub-criteria in the current drug reimbursement systems in South Korea and examined sociodemographic factors that associated with PV. METHODS: The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to quantify the PVs of criteria and sub-criteria. We developed a questionnaire to generate pairwise comparison matrices among criteria and sub-criteria. From 27 March to 1 April 2023, we recruited 1,000 study participants using a quota sampling method stratified by age, sex, and region based on Korean census data. RESULTS: The PVs for the criteria were highest for clinical usefulness (28.5%), followed by cost-effectiveness (27.1%), budget impact (24.3%), and reimbursement in other countries (20.1%). The sociodemographic characteristics of the participants had a significant impact on the PVs of the criteria. Willingness to pay additional premiums for national health insurance was negatively associated with PV for clinical usefulness and cost-effectiveness and positively associated with PV for reimbursement in other countries. CONCLUSIONS: The public prioritized clinical usefulness and cost-effectiveness as the main criteria. However, the PVs of the criteria were divergent and associated with sociodemographic factors. Divergent public interests require an evidence-informed deliberative process for reimbursement decisions.

Vicarious Dissonance: Pre-Registered Meta-Analysis.

The vicarious cognitive dissonance process predicts that observing an inconsistent act by a member of the ingroup causes uncomfortable arousal in the observer, inducing a motivation to reduce this discomfort. This meta-analysis examined the effect of vicarious cognitive dissonance based on 24 studies (N = 16,769). Our results indicated a small effect for the vicarious cognitive dissonance (g = 0.41 [0.27, 0.54], p <.001) with important variability between the outcomes. Our moderator analysis was limited by the low number of included studies. Publication bias analyses indicate a small true effect size (e.g., 3PSM: g = 0.22, p = .042), that was inflated by small sample sizes (R-index = 14.6%). We discussed theoretical issues concerning the psychological processes underlying vicarious cognitive dissonance, and methodological questions concerning operationalization. We proposed ways of improving the design and procedure to ensure that the effects found in the literature exist and are replicable.

Classification of Patients' Judgments of Their Physicians in Web-Based Written Reviews Using Natural Language Processing: Algorithm Development and Validation.

BACKGROUND: Patients increasingly rely on web-based physician reviews to choose a physician and share their experiences. However, the unstructured text of these written reviews presents a challenge for researchers seeking to make inferences about patients' judgments. Methods previously used to identify patient judgments within reviews, such as hand-coding and dictionary-based approaches, have posed limitations to sample size and classification accuracy. Advanced natural language processing methods can help overcome these limitations and promote further analysis of physician reviews on these popular platforms. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to train, test, and validate an advanced natural language processing algorithm for classifying the presence and valence of 2 dimensions of patient judgments in web-based physician reviews: interpersonal manner and technical competence. METHODS: We sampled 345,053 reviews for 167,150 physicians across the United States from Healthgrades.com, a commercial web-based physician rating and review website. We hand-coded 2000 written reviews and used those reviews to train and test a transformer classification algorithm called the Robustly Optimized BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa). The 2 fine-tuned models coded the reviews for the presence and positive or negative valence of patients' interpersonal manner or technical competence judgments of their physicians. We evaluated the performance of the 2 models against 200 hand-coded reviews and validated the models using the full sample of 345,053 RoBERTa-coded reviews. RESULTS: The interpersonal manner model was 90% accurate with precision of 0.89, recall of 0.90, and weighted F1-score of 0.89. The technical competence model was 90% accurate with precision of 0.91, recall of 0.90, and weighted F1-score of 0.90. Positive-valence judgments were associated with higher review star ratings whereas negative-valence judgments were associated with lower star ratings. Analysis of the data by review rating and physician gender corresponded with findings in prior literature. CONCLUSIONS: Our 2 classification models coded interpersonal manner and technical competence judgments with high precision, recall, and accuracy. These models were validated using review star ratings and results from previous research. RoBERTa can accurately classify unstructured, web-based review text at scale. Future work could explore the use of this algorithm with other textual data, such as social media posts and electronic health records.

The Role of Self-Compassion and Social Anxiety in the Relationship Between Cognitive Distortions and Emotional Eating.

This study aimed to examine the mediating role of self-compassion and social anxiety in the relationship between cognitive distortions and emotional eating. The research was carried out on 406 adult individuals between the ages of 18-25 living in different regions of Turkey. To measure research variables, Liebowitz social anxiety, thought types, self-sensitivity, and Turkish emotional eating scale were used. The scales were distributed to the participants online. The data were analyzed through the SPSS program. In the study, it was determined that self-compassion predicted emotional eating negatively and social anxiety predicted emotional eating positively. According to the results of the serial mediation analysis, it was determined that self-compassion and social anxiety mediated the relationship between cognitive distortions and emotional eating separately.

Is life going too fast? Exploring the unique and joint contributions of mindfulness, temperament, task load, and metacognitions about time.

BACKGROUND: Previous research has shown that mindfulness is associated with slower passage of time in everyday life, and with lower self-reported time pressure. This study investigates some of the potential mechanisms behind these relationships. METHODS: 318 participants submitted their responses to an online survey which collected data regarding passage of time judgments, time pressure, trait mindfulness, temperament, task load, and metacognitions about time. Using commonality and dominance analyses, we explored how these variables contributed, either alone or jointly, to predicting how fast (or slow) time seems to pass for participants, or how pressed for time they felt. RESULTS: Mindfulness and temperament had some overlaps in their ability to predict passage of time judgments and time pressure for durations at the month and 2-month scales. The temperamental trait of extraversion/surgency, as well as the Non-judging and Non-reacting facets of mindfulness were among the best predictors of passage of time judgments and time pressure. Attention-related variables were mainly related to time perception via their involvement in joint effects with other variables. Results also suggested that metacognitions about time interacted with other variables in predicting passage of time judgments, but only at the month scale. Finally, among all the variables included in this study, task load had the highest degree of involvement in predictions of self-reported time pressure at the week and month scales, but it contributed relatively little to predicting passage of time judgments. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that mindfulness relates to passage of time through its involvement in inferential processes. The data also shows how different factors are related to PoTJ at different time scales. Finally, results suggest the existence of both similarities and differences in how passage of time and time pressure relate to the other included variables.

The disconnect between metamemory and memory for emotional images.

Emotional information is reliably predicted to be remembered better than neutral information, and this has been found for words, images, and facial expressions. However, many studies find that these judgments of learning (JOLs) are not predictive of memory performance (e.g. [Hourihan, K. L. (2020). Misleading emotions: Judgments of learning overestimate recognition of negative and positive emotional images. Cognition and Emotion, 34(4), 771-782. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2019.1682972]). The present study investigates and rules out numerous potential causes for this discrepancy between memory predictions and performance, including (1) reactivity to making JOLs, (2) idiosyncrasies of specific images used, (3), type of memory test, and (4) effects of fluency. Three additional experiments investigate whether JOLs can become more predictive of memory performance, either by experience with the task or by manipulating prior beliefs about memory for emotional images. In all experiments, we found the same effect: Emotional images are inaccurately predicted to be remembered better than neutral images. The results suggest that emotion is used as a heuristic for learning, resulting in low metamnemonic accuracy for emotional stimuli.

Semantic versus perceptual priming: dissecting their impact on intuitive judgments of semantic coherence.

This research explores the mechanisms underlying the intuitive processing of semantic coherence, focusing on the effects of semantic and perceptual priming on semantic coherence detection. Two studies examined how these priming types influence individuals' abilities to discern semantic incoherence. In Study 1, we used solutions to semantically coherent triads as primes, finding that such priming significantly improves participants' accuracy and confidence in identifying incoherent elements within word tetrads. These results corroborate the hypothesis that intuitive judgments in linguistic tasks are closely tied to the processing fluency elicited by semantic connections. In Study 2, we show that perceptual priming does not significantly enhance accuracy, albeit it does increase the confidence with which individuals make their judgments. Distinct effects of semantic and perceptual priming on intuitive judgments highlight the complex interplay between processing fluency and affect in shaping intuitive judgments of semantic coherence. We discuss the nuanced roles of semantic and perceptual factors in influencing the accuracy and confidence of intuitive decisions.

High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.

Throughout the 21st century, economic inequality is predicted to increase as we face new challenges, from changes in the technological landscape to the growing climate crisis. It is crucial we understand how these changes in inequality may affect how people think and behave. We propose that economic inequality threatens the social fabric of society, in turn increasing moralization-that is, the greater tendency to employ or emphasize morality in everyday life-as an attempt to restore order and control. Using longitudinal data from X, formerly known as Twitter, our first study demonstrates that high economic inequality is associated with greater use of moral language online (e.g. the use of words such as "disgust", "hurt", and "respect'). Study 2 then examined data from 41 regions around the world, generally showing that higher inequality has a small association with harsher moral judgments of people's everyday actions. Together these findings demonstrate that economic inequality is linked to the tendency to see the world through a moral lens.