The relationships between urbanicity, general cognitive ability, and susceptibility to the Ebbinghaus illusion.

Previous studies have shown that, in samples of non-Western observers, susceptibility to the Ebbinghaus illusion is stronger in urban than rural dwellers. While such relationship between illusion strength and urbanicity has often been ascribed to external factors (such as the visual impact of the environment), the present study explored the possibility that it is instead mediated by general cognitive ability, an internal factor. We recruited a sample of remote Namibians who varied in their level of urbanicity, and measured their susceptibility to the Ebbinghaus illusion, their levels of education and literacy, and their general cognitive ability. The results showed that urbanicity was related to Ebbinghaus susceptibility, and that general cognitive ability, literacy and education did not mediate this effect, which is reassuring with regard to the findings of previous studies that did not control for these variables. However, we found robust relationships between urbanicity, on the one hand, and cognitive ability, education and literacy, on the other, which advocates for careful consideration of the impact of the latter variables in studies about the cognitive effects of urban environments.

Understanding the structure of autobiographical memories: A study of trauma memories from the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

How do we remember traumatic events, and are these memories different in individuals who experience post-traumatic stress? Some evidence suggests that traumatic events are mnemonically enhanced, or include more episodic detail, relative to other types of memories. Simultaneously, individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have more non-episodic details in all of their memories, a pattern hypothesized to result from impairment in executive function. Here, we explore these questions in a unique population that experienced severely traumatic events more than 20 years ago - individuals who lived through the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Participants recalled events from the genocide, negative events unrelated to the genocide, neutral events, and positive events. We used the Autobiographical Interview method to label memory details as episodic or non-episodic. We found that memories from the genocide showed robust mnemonic enhancement, with more episodic than non-episodic details, and contained more details overall than any other memory type. This pattern was not impacted by post-traumatic stress. Overall, this study provides evidence that traumatic events create vivid long-lasting episodic memories, in this case even more than 20 years later.

Easy-fix attentional focus manipulation boosts the intuitive and deliberate use of base-rate information.

In addressing human reasoning biases, "easy-fix" attentional focus interventions have shown that we can prompt reasoners to align responses with logico-mathematical principles. The current study aimed to test the impact of such interventions on both intuitive and deliberate responses on base-rate items. Using a two-response paradigm, participants provided initial intuitive responses under time constraints and cognitive load, followed by deliberate responses. During the intervention, we used attentional focus manipulations with base-rate items that aimed to redirect participants' attention toward the "logical" base-rate cue (i.e., the logical intervention) or toward the "heuristic" descriptive cue (i.e., the heuristic intervention). The results indicate that the logical intervention led to improved alignment with logico-mathematical principles in both intuitive and deliberate responses, albeit with a modest effect size. Conversely, the heuristic intervention had no discernible impact on accuracy. This indicates that our attentional focus manipulation is more effective at getting reasoners to respect rather than to override base-rates.

Sensitivity to geometric shape regularity in humans and baboons: A putative signature of human singularity.

Among primates, humans are special in their ability to create and manipulate highly elaborate structures of language, mathematics, and music. Here we show that this sensitivity to abstract structure is already present in a much simpler domain: the visual perception of regular geometric shapes such as squares, rectangles, and parallelograms. We asked human subjects to detect an intruder shape among six quadrilaterals. Although the intruder was always defined by an identical amount of displacement of a single vertex, the results revealed a geometric regularity effect: detection was considerably easier when either the base shape or the intruder was a regular figure comprising right angles, parallelism, or symmetry rather than a more irregular shape. This effect was replicated in several tasks and in all human populations tested, including uneducated Himba adults and French kindergartners. Baboons, however, showed no such geometric regularity effect, even after extensive training. Baboon behavior was captured by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but neither CNNs nor a variational autoencoder captured the human geometric regularity effect. However, a symbolic model, based on exact properties of Euclidean geometry, closely fitted human behavior. Our results indicate that the human propensity for symbolic abstraction permeates even elementary shape perception. They suggest a putative signature of human singularity and provide a challenge for nonsymbolic models of human shape perception.

The local perceptual bias of a non-remote and educated population.

In 1977, Navon argued that perception is biased towards the processing of global as opposed to local visual information (or the forest before the trees) and implicitly assumed this to be true across places and cultures. Previous work with normally developing participants has supported this assumption except in one extremely remote African population. Here, we explore local-global perceptual bias in normally developing African participants living much less remotely than the African population tested previously. These participants had access to modern artefacts and education but presented with a local bias on a similarity-matching Navon task, contrary to Navon's assumptions. Nevertheless, the urban and more educated amongst these participants showed a weaker local bias than the rural and less educated participants, suggesting an effect of urbanicity and education in driving differences in perceptual bias. Our findings confirm the impact of experience on perceptual bias and suggest that differences in the impact of education and urbanicity on lifestyles around the world can result in profound differences in perceptual style. In addition, they suggest that local bias is more common than previously thought; a global bias might not be universal after all.

The interplay between the importance of a decision and emotion in decision-making.

Decision-making literature has demonstrated that individuals' preferences are strongly affected by the way in which choices are presented. This cognitive bias, termed the framing effect, is influenced by the importance of the possible outcomes that a decision can have. However, the direction of this influence remains poorly understood. The aim of this paper was to examine the role of the importance of a decision in framing susceptibility and to explore a potential mechanism underlying this influence. Our first study revealed that participants display a framing effect when their decision implies a high importance outcome, but resist framing manipulation when their decision implies a low importance outcome. Our second study confirmed that an increase in the importance of a decision is associated with increasing framing susceptibility. Moreover, a moderated mediation analysis revealed that the more a decision was important, the more the gain and loss frames aroused opposite emotions, and this accounted for the increase in framing susceptibility. The results of these two studies confirmed that an increase in the importance of a decision is associated with increasing framing susceptibility and suggest that this influence on framing susceptibility is underpinned by emotion. Implications and direction for future studies are discussed.

The role of mothers' affiliate stigma and child's symptoms on the distress of mothers with ADHD children.

BACKGROUND: Mothers of ADHD children often display high levels of distress. Understanding the origin of such distress in a view to reducing it is an essential part of the clinical management of ADHD children. Studies have shown that children's symptoms are linked to mothers' stigma and that such stigma can cause mothers' distress. However, no study has explored the links between symptoms, stigma and distress. AIM: We tested (1) whether children's symptoms are sources of affiliate stigma, which in turn contributes to generating mothers' distress and (2) whether such relationship is stronger in mothers of male ADHD children. METHOD: 159 French mothers of an ADHD child were recruited. Four indices were used to assess mothers' distress: anxiety, depression, self-esteem and life satisfaction. Children's ADHD symptoms and mothers' affiliate stigma were also measured and contrasted with distress. RESULTS: Mothers' distress was positively related with both affiliate stigma and children's ADHD symptoms, but this was only true in mothers of male ADHD children. The relationship between children's symptoms and mothers' distress was mediated by affiliate stigma. CONCLUSIONS: Psychosocial interventions in mothers of ADHD children must integrate affiliate stigma and should be adjusted according to child's gender.

Independent effects of relevance and arousal on deductive reasoning.

Emotional content can have either a deleterious or a beneficial impact on logicality. Using standard deductive-reasoning tasks, we tested the hypothesis that the interplay of two factors - personal relevance and arousal - determines the nature of the effect of emotional content on logicality. Arousal was assessed using measures of skin conductance. Personal relevance was manipulated by asking participants to reason about semantic contents linked to an emotional event that they had experienced or not. Findings showed that (1) personal relevance exerts a positive effect on logicality while arousal exerts a negative effect, and that (2) these effects are independent of each other.

Effects of Culture and the Urban Environment on the Development of the Ebbinghaus Illusion.

The development of visual context effects in the Ebbinghaus illusion in the United Kingdom and in remote and urban Namibians (UN) was investigated (N = 336). Remote traditional Himba children showed no illusion up until 9-10 years, whereas UK children showed a robust illusion from 7 to 8 years of age. Greater illusion in UK than in traditional Himba children was stable from 9 to 10 years to adulthood. A lesser illusion was seen in remote traditional Himba children than in UN children growing up in the nearest town to the traditional Himba villages across age groups. We conclude that cross-cultural differences in perceptual biases to process visual context emerge in early childhood and are influenced by the urban environment.

Working memory function is linked to trauma exposure, independently of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of the study was to examine how working memory (WM) may be related to exposure to potentially traumatic events and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). METHOD: In four studies, we measured WM function using adaptations of the running span and the reading span tasks. We compared the performance of women reporting experiences of sexual abuse to control participants (total n = 144 controls and 84 victims). We measured severity of the sexual abuse experiences as well as exposure to general life stress. RESULTS: In all studies, trauma-exposed participants showed significantly lower WM function compared to control participants. In addition to traditional null hypothesis testing, we used a mini-meta analysis to estimate the combined estimated effect size of this difference, which was in the moderate range (d = 0.43 with 0.15-0.70 95% confidence interval). Regression equations showed that PTSD symptoms did not mediate the relationship between trauma exposure and WM function. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that trauma exposure per se can be associated with important cognitive correlates even in individuals who do not develop psychopathological reactions.

Emotional Stroop interference in trauma-exposed individuals: a contrast between two accounts.

In the Emotional Stroop task, trauma-exposed victims are slowed when naming the colour print of trauma-related words, showing the presence of interference. This interference has been assumed to reflect emotional reactions triggered by experience-relevant emotional content which interfere with the task. However, it may equally reflect the activation of task-competing thoughts triggered by experience-relevant semantic content, thus resulting from cognitive- rather than emotion-driven processes. This study contrasted these possibilities by measuring the relationship between Emotional Stroop interference, on the one hand, and severity of sexual-abuse experience, subjective ratings of emotionality, and working-memory measures, on the other. Whereas there was no relationship between working-memory measures and interference, providing no support for the cognitive-based account, experience severity, emotionality ratings and abuse-related interference were all positively related, providing support for the emotion-based account. These findings support the idea that the Emotional Stroop task can be used as a diagnostic tool for emotion-filtering impairment.

Debiasing thinking among non-WEIRD reasoners.

Human reasoning has been shown to be biased in a variety of situations. While most studies have focused on samples of WEIRD participants (from Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic societies), the sparse non-WEIRD data on the topic suggest an even stronger propensity for biased reasoning. This could be explained by a competence issue (people lack the ability to integrate logical knowledge into their reasoning) or a performance issue (people possess the logical knowledge but do not know it is relevant). We addressed this question using a debiasing paradigm with the base-rate task on a sample of non-industrialized people, the Himba of Namibia. After a short training, most participants were debiased, lending credence to the performance account. Debiasing was however to some extent boosted by schooling and living environment suggesting that competence also plays a role (in that more acquired knowledge allows for a higher training benefit). Results imply that debias interventions can be successfully employed to boost sound reasoning around the world.

Maternal trauma exposure is linked to adult offspring's cognitive functioning in the context of mass violence.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine whether mothers' level of trauma exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms are related to their offspring's cognitive functioning. METHOD: Mothers exposed to the 1994 genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi (N = 181) and one of their adult offspring were recruited in Rwanda. Mothers and their offspring answered questionnaires on sociodemographic information, the level of trauma exposure, and PTSD symptoms. They also performed a backward digit span task and a similarity task to assess their working memory and abstract reasoning, respectively. Hierarchical regression models were used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Mothers' level of trauma exposure, but not PTSD symptoms, was significantly related to their offspring's abstract reasoning performance after controlling for offspring's age, sex, and economic status. The relationship between mothers' level of trauma exposure, PTSD symptoms, and their offspring's working memory performance was not significant. Offspring's education was significantly linked to their working memory and abstract reasoning performance. CONCLUSIONS: The findings demonstrate that the intergenerational transmission of trauma can impact the cognitive functioning of the next generation. These results also illustrate the profound and long-term human impact of mass violence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Do local and global perceptual biases tell us anything about local and global selective attention?

Local, as opposed to global, perceptual bias has been linked to a lesser ability to attend globally. We examined this proposed link in Himba observers, members of a remote Namibian population who have demonstrated a strong local bias compared with British observers. If local perceptual bias is related to a lesser ability to attend globally, Himba observers, relative to British observers, should be less distracted by global information when performing a local-selection task but more distracted by local information when performing a global-selection task. However, Himba observers performed better than British observers did on both a local-selection task and a global-selection task (both of which used local/global hierarchical figures as stimuli), which suggests that they possessed greater control over attentional selection in response to task demands. We conclude that local and global perceptual biases must be distinguished from local and global selective attention.

Trend judgment as a perceptual building block of graphicacy and mathematics, across age, education, and culture.

Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, has thus become a fundamental cultural skill comparable to literacy or numeracy. Here, we introduce a measure of intuitive graphicacy that assesses the perceptual ability to detect a trend in noisy scatterplots ("does this graph go up or down?"). In 3943 educated participants, responses vary as a sigmoid function of the t-value that a statistician would compute to detect a significant trend. We find a minimum level of core intuitive graphicacy even in unschooled participants living in remote Namibian villages (N = 87) and 6-year-old 1st-graders who never read a graph (N = 27). The sigmoid slope that we propose as a proxy of intuitive graphicacy increases with education and tightly correlates with statistical and mathematical knowledge, showing that experience contributes to refining graphical intuitions. Our tool, publicly available online, allows to quickly evaluate and formally quantify a perceptual building block of graphicacy.

A 21st century cognitive portrait of the Himba, a remote people of Namibia.

This research sketches the cognitive portrait of the Himba, a remote population from Northern Namibia living in a non-industrial society almost completely devoid of modern artefacts. We compared the Himba sample to a French sample, exploring cognitive reflection, moral judgement, cooperative behaviour, paranormal beliefs, and happiness. We looked for both differences and similarities across cultures, and for the way cognitive functioning is associated with a range of demographic variables. Results showed some important group differences, with the Himba being more intuitive, more religious, happier, and less utilitarian than the French participants. Further, the predictors of these beliefs and behaviours differed between the two groups. The present results provide additional support to the recent line of research targeting cultural variations and similarities, and call for the need to expand psychology research beyond the Western world.

Intergenerational transmission of trauma and its association with attitudes toward reconciliation.

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to investigate the link between mothers' posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and their adult offspring's attitudes toward reconciliation and psychopathology among survivors of the 1994 genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda. We also sought to examine whether parenting styles mediate the relationship between mothers' PTSD symptoms and their adult offspring's psychopathology, if any. METHOD: Mother-child dyads (N = 181) were recruited in Rwanda and completed measures of trauma exposure, PTSD, depression, attitudes toward reconciliation, and parenting styles. RESULTS: Adult offspring of mothers who suffered from more severe PTSD symptoms had less favorable attitudes toward reconciliation, even after controlling for their own PTSD symptoms. Mothers' PTSD symptoms were not associated with their adult offspring's PTSD or depression symptoms. In addition, mothers' PTSD symptoms did not predict their parenting styles. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the mental health of survivors of mass violence has repercussions on the intergroup attitudes of the following generation. This study has practical implications for sustainable peacebuilding in postconflict societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

From bias to sound intuiting: Boosting correct intuitive reasoning.

Although human thinking is often biased by erroneous intuitions, recent de-bias studies suggest that people's performance can be boosted by short training interventions, where the correct answers to reasoning problems are explained. However, the nature of this training effect remains unclear. Does training help participants correct erroneous intuitions through deliberation? Or does it help them develop correct intuitions? We addressed this issue in three studies, by focusing on the well-known Bat-and-Ball problem. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants first gave an initial intuitive response, under time pressure and cognitive load, and then gave a final response after deliberation. Studies 1 and 2 showed that not only did training boost performance, it did so as early as the intuitive stage. After training, most participants solved the problems correctly from the outset and no longer needed to correct an initial incorrect answer through deliberation. Study 3 indicated that this sound intuiting sustained over at least two months. The findings confirm that a short training can boost sound reasoning at an intuitive stage. We discuss key theoretical and applied implications.

Cultural Differences in Face Recognition and Potential Underlying Mechanisms.

The ability to recognize a face is crucial for the success of social interactions. Understanding the visual processes underlying this ability has been the focus of a long tradition of research. Recent advances in the field have revealed that individuals having different cultural backgrounds differ in the type of visual information they use for face processing. However, the mechanisms that underpin these differences remain unknown. Here, we revisit recent findings highlighting group differences in face processing. Then, we integrate these results in a model of visual categorization developed in the field of psychophysics: the RAP framework. On the basis of this framework, we discuss potential mechanisms, whether face-specific or not, that may underlie cross-cultural differences in face perception.

Urbanisation, the arousal system, and covert and overt attentional selection.

Urbanisation is growing rapidly. We review evidence that this growth is altering the default information processing style of human beings by impacting both overt and covert processes of attentional selection (i.e. attentional selection with and without eye movements respectively), in ways consistent with reduced attentional engagement and increased exploration. While the factors and systems mediating these effects are likely to be many and various, we focus on one system which may be responsible for mediating effects on both covert and overt attentional selection. Specifically, the neuromodulatory locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system is key to regulating cognitive function in a behaviourally relevant and arousal-dependent manner and therefore well suited to supporting adaptation to the profound socio-ecological changes inherent in urbanisation.