Credibility of misinformation source moderates the effectiveness of corrective messages on social media.

To examine how different features of corrective messages moderate individuals' attitudes toward misinformation on social media, a 2 (misinformation source credibility: high vs low) × 2 (corrective message source: algorithmic vs peer correction) × 2 (correction type: factual elaboration vs simple rebuttal) between-subjects experiment was conducted. To reduce perceived credibility and respondents' attitudes toward the misinformation, peer corrections were more effective than algorithmic corrections for misinformation from a source with lower credibility; for misinformation from a highly credible source, the superiority effect of peer corrections was still significant on perceived credibility but not on respondents' attitudes toward the misinformation. For the fact-checking tendency, we did not find a robust effect about how different features of corrective messages interacted. Our findings provide important insights into message design in combatting misinformation on social media.

Investigating how immersive virtual reality and active navigation mediate the experience of virtual concerts.

We conducted an experiment to examine how virtual reality (VR) and active navigation interact to improve audience experience in virtual concerts. To manipulate the medium, the participants were presented with concert-related audiovisual stimuli via a head-mounted VR device or a computer. To manipulate the participants' access to different perspectives (navigation mode), they were allowed to actively switch, or were passively guided, between the audience's perspective and the performer's perspective. According to the results, VR and active navigation induced a higher sense of presence (feeling of being somewhere else) than did computer and passive navigation, and thus, they increased the audience's state of flow and gave them higher degrees of satisfaction and concert-attending intention. VR and active navigation also increased the participants' role identification (feeling of being someone else), which again gave them higher degrees of satisfaction and concert-attending intention. This research contributes to the literature supporting VR's enhancement of concert experiences and further highlights the important relationship between action, perception, and experience satisfaction.

Channels Adopted for Information Seeking during COVID-19: Comparing Social Media with News Media and Interpersonal Communication in Taiwan.

By adopting niche theory, this study compared social media with news media and interpersonal communication regarding their capabilities in satisfying people's information needs of daily use, surveillance, convenience, and information quality during the outbreak of COVID-19. Two methods were adopted to collect data for this study: the first was to conduct 20 intensive interviews, and the second was to administer an online survey by contracting a professional polling company with a panel of 8.8 million members. The stratified random sampling method was used to acquire a representative sample, from which 1100 valid questionnaires were obtained. The results showed that: (1) Social media were superior to traditional news media in terms of its convenience. However, several new types of online news, such as Yahoo news, were able to compete with social media for convenience. (2) Interpersonal communication did not outperform in satisfying individuals' needs for the four gratifications. Nevertheless, interpersonal communication plays the role of social support for individuals.

Information Seeking and Processing during the Outbreak of COVID-19 in Taiwan: Examining the Effects of Emotions and Informational Subjective Norms.

Adopting the model of risk information seeking and processing (RISP) as a theoretical framework, the objective of this study was to investigate the factors that prompted individuals' information-seeking and -processing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan. There were two unique aspects in this study: one was to adopt specific emotions to investigate the impact of negative emotions, and the other was to examine the effect of informational subjective norms (ISNs) on information-seeking and -processing behavior. An online survey was conducted by a professional polling company, and a stratified random sampling method was employed, using gender, age, education, personal income, and residential areas as strata to select participants. This study obtained 1100 valid questionnaires. The results showed that (1) risk perception did not exert any significant impacts on respondents' perceived information insufficiency; (2) risk perception exerted a powerful impact on respondents' ISNs, which, in turn, positively affected their information insufficiency; (3) the respondents who experienced fear were found to have a high probability of using a systematic-processing mode, while the respondents who experienced anger were more likely to adopt a heuristic-processing mode to process information; and (4) the use of a systematic-processing mode was positively associated, while the use of a heuristic-processing mode was negatively associated, with information-seeking behavior.

Empathy reduces susceptibility to false memory.

Psychological and physiological evidence has demonstrated that the underlying mechanisms for empathy and for autobiographical memories were related to a great extent. However, whether the facilitative effect of empathy on memory also applied to misinformation was unknown. To test this, we used a misinformation paradigm on a sample of 51 participants aged 20-27. The participants viewed videos that evoked different degrees of empathy, and then were fed misleading information. The participants' susceptibility to misleading information was lower for the videos that provoked a high degree of empathy compared to the videos that provoked a low degree of empathy. Based on our data, we conclude that empathy can prevent people from being misled by false information.

Exploring Psychological Factors for COVID-19 Vaccination Intention in Taiwan.

To underpin the psychological factors for vaccination intention, we explored the variables related to positive and negative attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination in Taiwan. The data were collected via an online survey platform with a sample size of 1100 in April 2021. We found that people's interpretations of the origin of the virus were relevant. People who tended to believe that the virus was artificially created felt powerless and were more concerned about the possible side-effects of the vaccines, which was negatively associated with their vaccination intention. The source of vaccine recommendation was found to be relevant to vaccination intention. People's vaccination intention was highest if the vaccines were recommended by health professionals, followed by friends and the government, and then mainstream media and social media. The analysis of the demographic variables showed that men tended to be more receptive to vaccines than women. Our findings should provide insights into developing communication strategies to effectively promote vaccination intentions.

How Does Gender Stereotype Affect the Memory of Advertisements? A Behavioral and Electroencephalography Study.

Previous studies have shown equivocal results about whether atypical or unusual events, compared with typical ones, facilitate or inhibit memory. We suspect that the indefinite findings could be partly due to the recall task used in these studies, as the participants might have used inference instead of recall in their responses. In the present study, we tested the recognition memory for real (Experiment 1) and fabricated (Experiment 2) advertisements, which could be congruent or incongruent with gender stereotypes. In congruent advertisements, a female endorser presented a traditionally considered feminine product or a male endorser presented a traditionally considered masculine product, whereas the gender-product type matching reversed in incongruent advertisements. The results of both behavioral experiments revealed that the participants' memory performance for stereotype-incongruent advertisements was higher than for congruent ones. In the event-related potential (ERP) recordings in Experiment 3, larger positive amplitudes were found for stereotype-incongruent advertisements than for congruent advertisements on the left parietal sites, suggesting a deeper encoding process for stereotype-incongruent information than for stereotype-congruent information.

Bad words prevail: Negatively charged Chinese characters accelerate attentional selection and preoccupy cognitive resources for consolidation.

Previous studies have produced contradictory findings regarding whether emotion exerts facilitative effects or inhibitory effects on perception. In the present study, we hypothesized that attention can be separated into the initial selection stage and the latter consolidation stage, and emotion plays a different role in each of these two stages. To test this hypothesis, we adopted the dual-stream rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (Goodbourn & Holcombe, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(2), 364-384, 2015), which provided separate measurements for selection latency (how delayed the attentional selection process is) and efficacy (how much information can be successfully consolidated for conscious report). The results suggested emotion's dual role on perception. Firstly, the presence of negatively charged visual targets (which were Chinese characters in the present study) accelerated attention selection, and the acceleration effect could spread to different locations in the visual field. Secondly, negatively charged characters preoccupied attentional resources for consolidation, yielding location-specific facilitative and inhibitory effects.

Three-Stage Single-Chambered Microbial Fuel Cell Biosensor Inoculated with Exiguobacterium aestuarii YC211 for Continuous Chromium (VI) Measurement.

Chromium (VI) [Cr(VI)] compounds display high toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic potential. Biological analysis techniques (e.g., such as enzyme-based or cell-based sensors) have been developed to measure Cr(VI); however, these biological elements are sensitive to the environment, limited to measuring trace Cr(VI), and require deployment offsite. In this study, a three-stage single-chambered microbial fuel cell (SCMFC) biosensor inoculated with Exiguobacterium aestuarii YC211 was developed for in situ, real-time, and continuous Cr(VI) measurement. A negative linear relationship was observed between the Cr(VI) concentration (5⁻30 mg/L) and the voltage output using an SCMFC at 2-min liquid retention time. The theoretical Cr(VI) measurement range of the system could be extended to 5⁻90 mg/L by connecting three separate SCMFCs in series. The three-stage SCMFC biosensor could accurately measure Cr(VI) concentrations in actual tannery wastewater with low deviations (<7%). After treating the wastewater with the SCMFC, the original inoculated E. aestuarii remained dominant (>92.5%), according to the next-generation sequencing analysis. The stable bacterial community present in the SCMFC favored the reliable performance of the SCMFC biosensor. Thus, the three-stage SCMFC biosensor has potential as an early warning device with wide dynamic range for in situ, real-time, and continuous Cr(VI) measurement of tannery wastewater.

Does "a picture is worth 1000 words" apply to iconic Chinese words? Relationship of Chinese words and pictures.

The meaning of a picture can be extracted rapidly, but the form-to-meaning relationship is less obvious for printed words. In contrast to English words that follow grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rule, the iconic nature of Chinese words might predispose them to activate their semantic representations more directly from their orthographies. By using the paradigm of repetition blindness (RB) that taps into the early level of word processing, we examined whether Chinese words activate their semantic representations as directly as pictures do. RB refers to the failure to detect the second occurrence of an item when it is presented twice in temporal proximity. Previous studies showed RB for semantically related pictures, suggesting that pictures activate their semantic representations directly from their shapes and thus two semantically related pictures are represented as repeated. However, this does not apply to English words since no RB was found for English synonyms. In this study, we replicated the semantic RB effect for pictures, and further showed the absence of semantic RB for Chinese synonyms. Based on our findings, it is suggested that Chinese words are processed like English words, which do not activate their semantic representations as directly as pictures do.

Attention without awareness: Attentional modulation of perceptual grouping without awareness.

Perceptual grouping is the process through which the perceptual system combines local stimuli into a more global perceptual unit. Previous studies have shown attention to be a modulatory factor for perceptual grouping. However, these studies mainly used explicit measurements, and, thus, whether attention can modulate perceptual grouping without awareness is still relatively unexplored. To clarify the relationship between attention and perceptual grouping, the present study aims to explore how attention interacts with perceptual grouping without awareness. The task was to judge the relative lengths of two centrally presented horizontal bars while a railway-shaped pattern defined by color similarity was presented in the background. Although the observers were unaware of the railway-shaped pattern, their line-length judgment was biased by that pattern, which induced a Ponzo illusion, indicating grouping without awareness. More importantly, an attentional modulatory effect without awareness was manifested as evident by the observer's performance being more often biased when the railway-shaped pattern was formed by an attended color than when it was formed by an unattended one. Also, the attentional modulation effect was shown to be dynamic, being more pronounced with a short presentation time than a longer one. The results of the present study not only clarify the relationship between attention and perceptual grouping but also further contribute to our understanding of attention and awareness by corroborating the dissociation between attention and awareness.

Selecting multiple features delays perception, but only when targets are horizontally arranged.

Based on the finding that perception is lagged by attention split on multiple features (Lo et al., 2012), this study investigated how the feature-based lag effect interacts with the target spatial arrangement. Participants were presented with gratings the spatial frequencies of which constantly changed. The task was to monitor two gratings of the same or different colors and report their spatial frequencies right before the stimulus offset. The results showed a perceptual lag wherein the reported value was closer to the physical value some time prior to the stimulus offset. This lag effect was larger when the two gratings were of different colors than when they were the same color. Furthermore, the feature-based lag effect was statistically significant when the two gratings were horizontally arranged but not when they were vertically or diagonally arranged. A model is proposed to explain the effect of target arrangement: When targets are horizontally arranged, selecting an additional feature delays perception. When targets are vertically or diagonally arranged, target selection for the lower field is prioritized. This prioritization on the lower target might prompt observers to only select the lower target and ignore the upper one, and this causes more perceptual errors without delaying perception.

How do we select multiple features? Transient costs for selecting two colors rather than one, persistent costs for color-location conjunctions.

In a previous study Lo, Howard, & Holcombe (Vision Research 63:20-33, 2012), selecting two colors did not induce a performance cost, relative to selecting one color. For example, requiring possible report of both a green and a red target did not yield a worse performance than when both targets were green. Yet a cost of selecting multiple colors was observed when selection needed be contingent on both color and location. When selecting a red target to the left and a green target to the right, superimposing a green distractor to the left and a red distractor to the right impeded performance. Possibly, participants cannot confine attention to a color at a particular location. As a result, distractors that share the target colors disrupt attentional selection of the targets. The attempt to select the targets must then be repeated, which increases the likelihood that the trial terminates when selection is not effective, even for long trials. Consistent with this, here we find a persistent cost of selecting two colors when the conjunction of color and location is needed, but the cost is confined to short exposure durations when the observer just has to monitor red and green stimuli without the need to use the location information. These results suggest that selecting two colors is time-consuming but effective, whereas selection of simultaneous conjunctions is never entirely successful.

Feature-based attentional interference revealed in perceptual errors and lags.

According to a limited-resource account of feature-based attention, dividing feature-based attention by selecting targets on the basis of different features dilutes its power. Multiple-feature costs have been documented previously, but it is not clear whether the multiple-feature cost arose at the selection (segregating targets from non-targets) stage predicted by the limited-resource account. The cost might instead result from a post-selection difficulty in processing or accessing the contents of the targets. By defining the targets with a selection attribute (color) that is very distinct from the attribute participants must access and report (spatial period), we were able to manipulate the selection process independently from the access stage. We still found a cost for different selection features (colors), suggesting that multiple-feature costs can arise at the selection stage. The cost was only significant however when distracters were present that shared the selection features. The cost manifested not only as greater errors or less precision in reporting the access attribute (spatial period), but also as an increased temporal lag between the physical stimuli and the reported percept. In summary, splitting selection among different features incurred little or no penalty by itself, but selection interference by distracters sharing target features could be large and could slow processing.

Independence between implicit and explicit processing as revealed by the Simon effect.

Studies showing human behavior influenced by subliminal stimuli mainly focus on implicit processing per se, and little is known about its interaction with explicit processing. We examined this by using the Simon effect, wherein a task-irrelevant spatial distracter interferes with lateralized response. Lo and Yeh (2008) found that the visual Simon effect, although it occurred when participants were aware of the visual distracters, did not occur with subliminal visual distracters. We used the same paradigm and examined whether subliminal and supra-threshold stimuli are processed independently by adding a supra-threshold auditory distracter to ascertain whether it would interact with the subliminal visual distracter. Results showed auditory Simon effect, but there was still no visual Simon effect, indicating that supra-threshold and subliminal stimuli are processed separately in independent streams. In contrast to the traditional view that implicit processing precedes explicit processing, our results suggest that they operate independently in a parallel fashion.

Dissociation of processing time and awareness by the inattentional blindness paradigm.

Consciousness researchers are interested in distinguishing between mental activity that occurs with and without awareness (i.e., explicit versus implicit processes). The inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm is an excellent tool for this question because it permits the independent manipulation of processing time and awareness. In the present study, we show that implicit texture segregation can occur during inattentional blindness, provided that the texture is exposed for a sufficient duration. In contrast, a Simon effect does not occur during inattentional blindness, even with similar exposure duration of the critical stimulus. This reveals a dissociation between processing time and awareness, consistent with the possibility of separate processing streams for explicit and implicit visual perception.