Emotional content reduces the cognitive effort invested in processing the credibility of social (mis)information.

Emotionality likely is a key factor affecting our susceptibility to misinformation. However, the mechanisms underlying this observation are not well understood. Specifically, when people derive social information from person-related news, they rely predominantly on emotional content, apparently unperturbed by the credibility of the source. To help explain this bias, we here contrast two hypotheses of information processing reflected in changes in pupil size during news-based judgments: Emotion and cognitive effort. Thirty participants were first exposed to websites of well-known trusted or distrusted news media sources exhibiting headlines about unfamiliar persons, followed by social judgments. As expected, emotional relative to neutral headline contents lead to faster and more strongly valenced judgments. In line with the cognitive effort hypothesis, credibility modulated pupil size with larger pupils for headlines from distrusted sources, however only in response to neutral headline contents. Source credibility did not modulate pupil size in response to emotional headline contents. Instead, pupil size was smaller for emotional compared to neutral headlines for both trusted and distrusted sources. This pattern of findings suggests that emotional contents yield fluent social judgments that are made with relatively little mental effort-even if based on untrustworthy news. Cognitive resources to evaluate the credibility of news may primarily be allocated when emotional contents providing (false) fluency are not available. This insight into the biases underlying the processing of potential misinformation may be used as a protection against biased opinions and judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Mutual inclusivity improves decision-making by smoothing out choice's competitive edge.

Decisions form a central bottleneck to most tasks, one that people often experience as costly. Past work proposes mitigating those costs by lowering one's threshold for deciding. Here, we test an alternative solution, one that targets the basis for most choice costs: that choosing one option sacrifices others (mutual exclusivity). Across 5 studies (N = 462), we test whether this tension can be relieved by framing choices as inclusive (allowing selection of more than one option, as in buffets). We find that inclusivity makes choices more efficient, by selectively reducing competition between potential responses as participants accumulate information for each of their options. Inclusivity also made participants feel less conflicted, especially when they couldn't decide which good option to keep or which bad option to get rid of. These inclusivity benefits were also distinguishable from the effects of manipulating decision threshold (increased urgency), which improved choices but not experiences thereof.

Learning how to reason and deciding when to decide.

Research on human reasoning has both popularized and struggled with the idea that intuitive and deliberate thoughts stem from two different systems, raising the question how people switch between them. Inspired by research on cognitive control and conflict monitoring, we argue that detecting the need for further thought relies on an intuitive, context-sensitive process that is learned in itself.

Learning when effort matters: neural dynamics underlying updating and adaptation to changes in performance efficacy.

To determine how much cognitive control to invest in a task, people need to consider whether exerting control matters for obtaining rewards. In particular, they need to account for the efficacy of their performance-the degree to which rewards are determined by performance or by independent factors. Yet it remains unclear how people learn about their performance efficacy in an environment. Here we combined computational modeling with measures of task performance and EEG, to provide a mechanistic account of how people (i) learn and update efficacy expectations in a changing environment and (ii) proactively adjust control allocation based on current efficacy expectations. Across 2 studies, subjects performed an incentivized cognitive control task while their performance efficacy (the likelihood that rewards are performance-contingent or random) varied over time. We show that people update their efficacy beliefs based on prediction errors-leveraging similar neural and computational substrates as those that underpin reward learning-and adjust how much control they allocate according to these beliefs. Using computational modeling, we show that these control adjustments reflect changes in information processing, rather than the speed-accuracy tradeoff. These findings demonstrate the neurocomputational mechanism through which people learn how worthwhile their cognitive control is.

Response-based outcome predictions and confidence regulate feedback processing and learning.

Influential theories emphasize the importance of predictions in learning: we learn from feedback to the extent that it is surprising, and thus conveys new information. Here, we explore the hypothesis that surprise depends not only on comparing current events to past experience, but also on online evaluation of performance via internal monitoring. Specifically, we propose that people leverage insights from response-based performance monitoring - outcome predictions and confidence - to control learning from feedback. In line with predictions from a Bayesian inference model, we find that people who are better at calibrating their confidence to the precision of their outcome predictions learn more quickly. Further in line with our proposal, EEG signatures of feedback processing are sensitive to the accuracy of, and confidence in, post-response outcome predictions. Taken together, our results suggest that online predictions and confidence serve to calibrate neural error signals to improve the efficiency of learning.

Age-related changes in the neural dynamics of bottom-up and top-down processing during visual object recognition: an electrophysiological investigation.

When recognizing objects in our environments, we rely on both what we see and what we know. While older adults often display increased sensitivity to top-down influences of contextual information during object recognition, the locus of this increased sensitivity remains unresolved. To examine the effects of aging on the neural dynamics of bottom-up and top-down visual processing during rapid object recognition, we probed the differential effects of object perceptual ambiguity and scene context congruity on specific EEG event-related potential components indexing dissociable processes along the visual processing stream. Older adults displayed larger behavioral scene congruity effects than young adults. Older adults' larger visual P2 amplitudes to object perceptual ambiguity (as opposed to the scene congruity P2 effects in young adults) suggest continued resolution of perceptual ambiguity that interfered with scene congruity processing, while post-perceptual semantic integration (as indexed by N400) remained largely intact. These findings suggest that compromised bottom-up perceptual processing in healthy aging leads to an increased involvement of top-down processes to resolve greater perceptual ambiguity during object recognition.

Bridging Motor and Cognitive Control: It's About Time!

Is how we control our thoughts similar to how we control our movements? Egger et al. show that the neural dynamics underlying the control of internal states exhibit similar algorithmic properties as those that control movements. This experiment reveals a promising connection between how we control our brain and our body.

Goal congruency dominates reward value in accounting for behavioral and neural correlates of value-based decision-making.

When choosing between options, whether menu items or career paths, we can evaluate how rewarding each one will be, or how congruent it is with our current choice goal (e.g., to point out the best option or the worst one.). Past decision-making research interpreted findings through the former lens, but in these experiments the most rewarding option was always most congruent with the task goal (choosing the best option). It is therefore unclear to what extent expected reward vs. goal congruency can account for choice value findings. To deconfound these two variables, we performed three behavioral studies and an fMRI study in which the task goal varied between identifying the best vs. the worst option. Contrary to prevailing accounts, we find that goal congruency dominates choice behavior and neural activity. We separately identify dissociable signals of expected reward. Our findings call for a reinterpretation of previous research on value-based choice.

Group-Level EEG-Processing Pipeline for Flexible Single Trial-Based Analyses Including Linear Mixed Models.

Here we present an application of an EEG processing pipeline customizing EEGLAB and FieldTrip functions, specifically optimized to flexibly analyze EEG data based on single trial information. The key component of our approach is to create a comprehensive 3-D EEG data structure including all trials and all participants maintaining the original order of recording. This allows straightforward access to subsets of the data based on any information available in a behavioral data structure matched with the EEG data (experimental conditions, but also performance indicators, such accuracy or RTs of single trials). In the present study we exploit this structure to compute linear mixed models (LMMs, using lmer in R) including random intercepts and slopes for items. This information can easily be read out from the matched behavioral data, whereas it might not be accessible in traditional ERP approaches without substantial effort. We further provide easily adaptable scripts for performing cluster-based permutation tests (as implemented in FieldTrip), as a more robust alternative to traditional omnibus ANOVAs. Our approach is particularly advantageous for data with parametric within-subject covariates (e.g., performance) and/or multiple complex stimuli (such as words, faces or objects) that vary in features affecting cognitive processes and ERPs (such as word frequency, salience or familiarity), which are sometimes hard to control experimentally or might themselves constitute variables of interest. The present dataset was recorded from 40 participants who performed a visual search task on previously unfamiliar objects, presented either visually intact or blurred. MATLAB as well as R scripts are provided that can be adapted to different datasets.

The role of affective evaluation in conflict adaptation: An LRP study.

Conflict between incompatible response tendencies is typically followed by control adjustments aimed at diminishing subsequent conflicts, a phenomenon often called conflict adaptation. Dreisbach and Fischer (2015, 2016) recently proposed that it is not the conflict per se but the aversive quality of a conflict that originally motivates this kind of sequential control adjustment. With the present study we tested the causal role of aversive signals in conflict adaptation in a more direct way. To this end, after each trial of a vertical Simon task participants rated whether they experienced the last trial as rather pleasant or unpleasant. Conflict adaptation was measured via lateralized readiness potentials as a measure of early motor-related activation that were computed on the basis of event-related brain potentials. Results showed the typical suppression of automatic response activation following trials rated as unpleasant, whereas suppression was relaxed following trials rated as pleasant. That is, sequential control adaptation was not based on previous conflict but on the subjective affective experience. This is taken as evidence that negative affect even in the absence of actual conflict triggers subsequent control adjustments.

Come to think of it: Contributions of reasoning abilities and training schedule to skill acquisition in a virtual throwing task.

According to Schmidt's schema theory skill acquisition is based on schema formation where multiple learning incidents with varying task features are abstracted to a unifying pattern, the schema. Practice can be scheduled block-wise, with low contextual interference (CI) or randomly, with high CI. The greater effort during high CI training usually results in reduced training success but enhanced retention and transfer performance. In contrast to well-established CI effects for simple tasks, findings for complex tasks are heterogeneous, supposedly due to the detrimental accumulation of task demands. We assumed that in complex tasks, cognitive reasoning abilities might impose a limit upon schema formation and hence the effectiveness of CI. In a virtual overarm-throwing experiment participants practiced target positions at center, left, or right and were retested for retention - at the center position - and transfer with a larger target distance. Although there was no main effect of CI on performance, either in training, retention or transfer, under high CI, training performance was better for participants with higher reasoning ability, as measured with the Raven matrices. This advantage persisted across retention and transfer. Under low CI, reasoning was positively related to performance improvement only in the last third of training. We argue, that variability of practice is a necessary prerequisite for beneficial effects of reasoning abilities. Based on previous findings, we discuss feedback evaluation as a possible locus of the relationship between reasoning and performance in motor skill acquisition.

(Don't) Mind the effort: Effects of contextual interference on ERP indicators of motor preparation.

Motor learning is associated with a decrease in frontal control-related brain activity and increase of central and parietal motor-related activity. Contextual interference (CI), manipulated typically by blocked versus randomized training schedules, affects motor learning, resulting in inferior performance during training but in superior performance during retention and transfer. The CI effect is often explained by increased processing demands under high CI training. Consistently, in the motor preparation phase, the activity of control- and attention-related brain areas is increased under high CI. Here, we investigated the effect of CI on learning-related changes in ERPs during motor preparation. Participants learned throwing at virtual targets and were tested for retention in the target condition 1 week later. The frontal P3 component decreased with learning during the first session and across sessions. In addition, there was a trend for a stronger reduction of P3 during retention after high CI training. Both initial and late contingent negative variation (iCNV and lCNV) amplitudes decreased with learning and showed a significantly stronger reduction under high CI. We conclude that CI modulates the interplay of cognitive and motor processes in the preparatory phase of motor learning and that a stronger involvement of cognitive processes during high CI training accounts for differential effects of CI on ERP indicators of motor preparation during retention.

The better, the bigger: The effect of graded positive performance feedback on the reward positivity.

In this study on skill acquisition in a computerized throwing task, we examined the effect of graded correct-related performance feedback on the reward positivity of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Theories of reinforcement learning predict effects of reward magnitude and expectancy on the reward prediction error. The later is supposed to be reflected in reward positivity, a fronto-central ERP component. A sample of 68 participants learned to throw at a beamer-projected target disk while performance accuracy, displayed as the place of impact of the projectile on the target, served as graded feedback. Effects of performance accuracy in successful trials, hit frequency, and preceding trial performance on reward positivity were analyzed simultaneously on a trial-by-trial basis by means of linear mixed models. In accord with previous findings, reward positivity increased with feedback about more accurate performance. This relationship was not linear, but cubic, with larger impact of feedback towards the end of the accuracy distribution. In line with being a measure of expectancy, the reward positivity decreased with increasing hit frequency and was larger after unsuccessful trials. The effect of hit frequency was more pronounced following successful trials. These results indicate a fast trial-by-trial adaptation of expectation. The results confirm predictions of reinforcement learning theory and extend previous findings on reward magnitude to the area of complex, goal directed skill acquisition.

Are individual differences in reading speed related to extrafoveal visual acuity and crowding?

Readers differ considerably in their speed of self-paced reading. One factor known to influence fixation durations in reading is the preprocessing of words in parafoveal vision. Here we investigated whether individual differences in reading speed or the amount of information extracted from upcoming words (the preview benefit) can be explained by basic differences in extrafoveal vision--i.e., the ability to recognize peripheral letters with or without the presence of flanking letters. Forty participants were given an adaptive test to determine their eccentricity thresholds for the identification of letters presented either in isolation (extrafoveal acuity) or flanked by other letters (crowded letter recognition). In a separate eye-tracking experiment, the same participants read lists of words from left to right, while the preview of the upcoming words was manipulated with the gaze-contingent moving window technique. Relationships between dependent measures were analyzed on the observational level and with linear mixed models. We obtained highly reliable estimates both for extrafoveal letter identification (acuity and crowding) and measures of reading speed (overall reading speed, size of preview benefit). Reading speed was higher in participants with larger uncrowded windows. However, the strength of this relationship was moderate and it was only observed if other sources of variance in reading speed (e.g., the occurrence of regressive saccades) were eliminated. Moreover, the size of the preview benefit--an important factor in normal reading--was larger in participants with better extrafoveal acuity. Together, these results indicate a significant albeit moderate contribution of extrafoveal vision to individual differences in reading speed.

Aiming for the bull's eye: Preparing for throwing investigated with event-related brain potentials.

We explored the feasibility of investigating complex goal-directed actions with event-related brain potentials by studying the aiming phase of throwing. A virtual reality environment was set up, allowing aimed throws at distant targets, with participants standing upright and moving relatively unrestrained. After a separate practice session, the contingent negative variation (CNV) was measured during preparation for a simple button release, unaimed throws, and aimed throws at targets of two levels of difficulty. Consistent with expectations, CNV amplitude was larger for all throwing conditions compared to button release. It further increased with task difficulty in the aimed throwing conditions, reflecting the increasing motor programming demands for more difficult goal-directed actions. Therefore, investigating throwing as an instance of complex goal-directed action with ERPs is feasible, opening interesting perspectives for future research.