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

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

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

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

Evidence of a metacognitive illusion in judgments about the effects of music on cognitive performance.

Two experiments serve to examine how people make metacognitive judgments about the effects of task-irrelevant sounds on cognitive performance. According to the direct-access account, people have direct access to the processes causing auditory distraction. According to the processing-fluency account, people rely on the feeling of processing fluency to make heuristic metacognitive judgments about the distracting effects of sounds. To manipulate the processing fluency of simple piano melodies and segments of Mozart's sonata K. 448, the audio files of the music were either left in their original forward direction or reversed. The results favor the processing-fluency account over the direct-access account: Even though, objectively, forward and backward music had the same distracting effect on serial recall, stimulus-specific prospective metacognitive judgments showed that participants incorrectly predicted only backward music but not forward music to be distracting. The difference between forward and backward music was reduced but not eliminated in global retrospective metacognitive judgments that participants provided after having experienced the distracting effect of the music first-hand. The results thus provide evidence of a metacognitive illusion in people's judgments about the effects of music on cognitive performance.

The effects of lineup size on the processes underlying eyewitness decisions.

Here we apply the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model to identify the effects of lineup size on the detection-based and non-detection-based processes underlying eyewitness decisions. In Experiment 1, lineup size was manipulated by showing participants simultaneous or sequential lineups that contained either three or six persons. In Experiment 2, the lineups contained either two or five persons. In both experiments, the culprit was better detected in smaller than in larger lineups. Furthermore, participants made fewer guessing-based selections in smaller than in larger lineups. However, guessing-based selection in larger lineups was not increased to a level sufficient to offset the effect of increased protection of suspects in larger lineups due to the fact that the guessing-based selections that occur are distributed across more persons. The results show that increasing the lineup size causes several changes in the detection-based and non-detection-based processes underlying eyewitness decisions.

Communicating emotions, but not expressing them privately, reduces moral punishment in a Prisoner's Dilemma game.

The existence of moral punishment, that is, the fact that cooperative people sacrifice resources to punish defecting partners requires an explanation. Potential explanations are that people punish defecting partners to privately express or to communicate their negative emotions in response to the experienced unfairness. If so, then providing participants with alternative ways to privately express or to communicate their emotions should reduce moral punishment. In two experiments, participants interacted with cooperating and defecting partners in a Prisoner's Dilemma game. After each round, participants communicated their emotions to their partners (Experiments 1 and 2) or only expressed them privately (Experiment 2). Each trial concluded with a costly punishment option. Compared to a no-expression control group, moral punishment was reduced when emotions were communicated to the defecting partner but not when emotions were privately expressed. Moral punishment may thus serve to communicate emotions to defecting partners. However, moral punishment was only reduced but far from being eliminated, suggesting that the communication of emotions does not come close to replacing moral punishment. Furthermore, prompting participants to focus on their emotions had undesirable side-effects: Privately expressing emotions diminished cooperation, enhanced hypocritical punishment (i.e., punishment of defecting partners by defecting participants), and induced an unspecific bias to punish the partners irrespective of their actions.

The animacy effect on free recall is equally large in mixed and pure word lists or pairs.

The cognitive mechanisms underlying the animacy effect on free recall have as yet to be identified. According to the attentional-prioritization account, animate words are better recalled because they recruit more attention at encoding than inanimate words. The account implies that the animacy effect should be larger when animate words are presented together with inanimate words in mixed lists or pairs than when animate and inanimate words are presented separately in pure lists or pairs. The present series of experiments served to systematically test whether list composition or pair composition modulate the animacy effect. In Experiment 1, the animacy effect was compared between mixed and pure lists. In Experiments 2 and 3, the words were presented in mixed or pure pairs to manipulate the direct competition for attention between animate and inanimate words at encoding. While encoding was intentional in Experiments 1 and 2, it was incidental in Experiment 3. In each experiment, a significant animacy effect was obtained, but the effect was equally large in mixed and pure lists or pairs of animate and inanimate words despite considerable sensitivity of the statistical test of the critical interaction. These findings provide evidence against the attentional-prioritization account of the animacy effect.

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

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate participants to generate more ideas than inanimate words at encoding. These ideas may later serve as retrieval cues and thus enhance recall. There is as yet only correlational evidence associating rich encoding and the animacy advantage in memory. To experimentally test the assumption that richness of encoding plays a causal role, we examined whether the animacy effect can be modulated by facilitating or suppressing rich encoding. In Experiment 1, richness of encoding was manipulated by requiring participants to write down four ideas or one idea in response to animate and inanimate words. In Experiment 2, the one-idea-generation condition was compared to an unrestricted-idea-generation condition. In Experiment 3, the unrestricted-idea-generation condition was compared to a distractor-task condition in which the idea-generation process was suppressed. In Experiment 4, richness of encoding was manipulated by asking participants to rate the relevance of the words for achieving three survival-related goals or one survival-related goal. Animate words were better remembered than inanimate words. In three of the four experiments, rich encoding led to improved recall. However, none of the manipulations of richness of encoding affected the animacy effect on memory, demonstrating its robustness irrespective of the encoding conditions. These results weaken the richness-of-encoding account of the animacy effect on memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring lineup fairness from eyewitness identification data using a multinomial processing tree model.

The mock-witness task is typically used to evaluate the fairness of lineups. However, the validity of this task has been questioned because there are substantial differences between the tasks for mock witnesses and eyewitnesses. Unlike eyewitnesses, mock witnesses must select a person from the lineup and are alerted to the fact that one lineup member might stand out from the others. It therefore seems desirable to base conclusions about lineup fairness directly on eyewitness data rather than on mock-witness data. To test the importance of direct measurements of biased suspect selection in eyewitness identification decisions, we assessed the fairness of lineups containing either morphed or non-morphed fillers using both mock witnesses and eyewitnesses. We used Tredoux's E and the proportion of suspect selections to measure lineup fairness from mock-witness choices and the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model to measure the biased selection of the suspects directly from eyewitness identification decisions. Results obtained in the mock-witness task and the model-based analysis of data obtained in the eyewitness task converged in showing that simultaneous lineups with morphed fillers were significantly more unfair than simultaneous lineups with non-morphed fillers. However, mock-witness and eyewitness data converged only when the eyewitness task mimicked the mock-witness task by including pre-lineup instructions that (1) discouraged eyewitnesses to reject the lineups and (2) alerted eyewitnesses that a photograph might stand out from the other photographs in the lineup. When a typical eyewitness task was created by removing these two features from the pre-lineup instructions, the morphed fillers no longer lead to unfair lineups. These findings highlight the differences in the cognitive processes of mock witnesses and eyewitnesses and they demonstrate the importance of measuring lineup fairness directly from eyewitness identification decisions rather than indirectly using the mock-witness task.

Evaluating the impact of first-yes-counts instructions on eyewitness performance using the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model.

In eyewitness research, multiple identification decisions in sequential lineups are typically prevented by telling participants that only their first identification decision counts. These first-yes-counts instructions are incompatible with standard police protocols prescribing that witnesses shall see the entire lineup. Horry et al. were the first to experimentally test how this discrepancy between eyewitness research and standard police protocols affects eyewitness identification decisions. Here, the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model was used to disentangle the effect of the first-yes-counts instructions on the detection and guessing processes underlying eyewitness identification decisions. We report both a reanalysis of Horry et al.'s data and a conceptual replication. Both the reanalysis and the results of the conceptual replication confirm that first-yes-counts instructions do not affect the detection of the culprit but decrease the probability of guessing-based selections. To improve the ecological validity, research on sequential lineups should avoid first-yes-counts instructions.

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

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

Negative target stimuli do not influence cross-modal auditory distraction.

The present study served to test whether emotion modulates auditory distraction in a serial-order reconstruction task. If auditory distraction results from an attentional trade-off between the targets and distractors, auditory distraction should decrease when attention is focused on targets with high negative arousal. Two experiments (with a total N of 284 participants) were conducted to test whether auditory distraction is influenced by target emotion. In Experiment 1 it was examined whether two benchmark effects of auditory distraction-the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect-differ as a function of whether negative high-arousal targets or neutral low-arousal targets are used. Experiment 2 complements Experiment 1 by testing whether target emotion modulates the disruptive effects of reversed sentential speech and steady-state distractor sequences relative to a quiet control condition. Even though the serial order of negative high-arousal targets was better remembered than that of neutral low-arousal targets, demonstrating an emotional facilitation effect on serial-order reconstruction, auditory distraction was not modulated by target emotion. The results provide support of the automatic-capture account according to which auditory distraction, regardless of the specific type of auditory distractor sequence that has to be ignored, is a fundamentally stimulus-driven effect that is rooted in the automatic processing of the to-be-ignored auditory stream and remains unaffected by emotional-motivational factors.

Coping with high advertising exposure: a source-monitoring perspective.

Consumers are exposed to large amounts of advertising every day. One way to avoid being manipulated is to monitor the sources of persuasive messages. In the present study it was tested whether high exposure to advertising affects the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions. Participants were exposed to high or low proportions of advertising messages that were intermixed with product statements from a trustworthy source. In a subsequent memory test, participants had to remember the sources of these statements. In Experiments 1 and 2, high advertising exposure led to increased source memory and decreased recognition of the statements in comparison to low advertising exposure. High advertising exposure also induced an increased tendency toward guessing that statements whose sources were not remembered came from advertising. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that the presence of advertising, relative to its absence, leads to a skeptical guessing bias. Being exposed to advertising thus has pronounced effects on the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions. These changes in source monitoring can be interpreted as coping mechanisms that serve to protect against the persuasive influence of advertising messages.

Experimental validation of a multinomial processing tree model for analyzing eyewitness identification decisions.

To improve police protocols for lineup procedures, it is helpful to understand the processes underlying eyewitness identification performance. The two-high threshold (2-HT) eyewitness identification model is a multinomial processing tree model that measures four latent cognitive processes on which eyewitness identification decisions are based: two detection-based processes (the detection of culprit presence and absence) and two non-detection-based processes (biased and guessing-based selection). The model takes into account the full 2 × 3 data structure of lineup procedures, that is, suspect identifications, filler identifications and rejections in both culprit-present and culprit-absent lineups. Here the model is introduced and the results of four large validation experiments are reported, one for each of the processes specified by the model. The validation experiments served to test whether the model's parameters sensitively reflect manipulations of the processes they were designed to measure. The results show that manipulations of exposure duration of the culprit's face at encoding, lineup fairness, pre-lineup instructions and ease of rejection of culprit-absent lineups were sensitively reflected in the parameters representing culprit-presence detection, biased suspect selection, guessing-based selection and culprit-absence detection, respectively. The results of the experiments thus validate the interpretations of the parameters of the 2-HT eyewitness identification model.

A validation of the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model by reanalyzing published data.

The two-high threshold (2-HT) eyewitness identification model serves as a new measurement tool to measure the latent cognitive processes underlying eyewitness identification performance. By simultaneously taking into account correct culprit identifications, false innocent-suspect identifications, false filler identifications in culprit-present and culprit-absent lineups as well as correct and false lineup rejections, the model capitalizes on the full range of data categories that are observed when measuring eyewitness identification performance. Thereby, the model is able to shed light on detection-based and non-detection-based processes underlying eyewitness identification performance. Specifically, the model incorporates parameters for the detection of culprit presence and absence, biased selection of the suspect and guessing-based selection among the lineup members. Here, we provide evidence of the validity of each of the four model parameters by applying the model to eight published data sets. The data sets come from studies with experimental manipulations that target one of the underlying processes specified by the model. Manipulations of encoding difficulty, lineup fairness and pre-lineup instructions were sensitively reflected in the parameters reflecting culprit-presence detection, biased selection and guessing-based selection, respectively. Manipulations designed to facilitate the rejection of culprit-absent lineups affected the parameter for culprit-absence detection. The reanalyses of published results thus suggest that the parameters sensitively reflect the manipulations of the processes they were designed to measure, providing support of the validity of the 2-HT eyewitness identification model.

Humans, machines, and double standards? The moral evaluation of the actions of autonomous vehicles, anthropomorphized autonomous vehicles, and human drivers in road-accident dilemmas.

A more critical evaluation of the actions of autonomous vehicles in comparison to those of human drivers in accident scenarios may complicate the introduction of autonomous vehicles into daily traffic. In two experiments, we tested whether the evaluation of actions in road-accident scenarios differs as a function of whether the actions were performed by human drivers or autonomous vehicles. Participants judged how morally adequate they found the actions of a non-anthropomorphized autonomous vehicle (Experiments 1 and 2), an anthropomorphized autonomous vehicle (Experiment 2), and a human driver (Experiments 1 and 2) in otherwise identical road-accident scenarios. The more lives were spared, the better the action was evaluated irrespective of the agent. However, regardless of the specific action that was chosen, the actions of the human driver were always considered more morally justifiable than the corresponding actions of the autonomous vehicle. The differences in the moral evaluations between the human driver and the autonomous vehicle were reduced, albeit not completely eliminated, when the autonomous vehicle was anthropomorphized (Experiment 2). Anthropomorphizing autonomous vehicles may thus influence the processes underlying moral judgments about the actions of autonomous vehicles such that the actions of anthropomorphized autonomous vehicles appear closer in moral justifiability to the actions of humans. The observed differences in the moral evaluation of the actions of human drivers and autonomous vehicles could cause a more critical public response to accidents involving autonomous vehicles compared to those involving human drivers which might be reduced by anthropomorphizing the autonomous vehicles.

Adaptive prospective memory for faces of cheaters and cooperators.

A central tenet of the adaptive-memory framework is that memory has not merely evolved to help us relive the past but to prepare us for the future. In reciprocal social exchange, for instance, people must learn from previous experiences to approach cooperators and to avoid cheaters. In this sense, adaptive memory is inherently prospective. The present research is the first to test this central assumption of the adaptive-memory framework. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants played a Prisoner's Dilemma game and encountered cheating, cooperating, and neutral partners. The faces of these partners later reappeared during an event-based prospective-memory task. Participants showed better prospective-memory performance for cooperator and cheater faces than for neutral control faces. Multinomial processing-tree modeling served to separate the prospective component (remembering that an action needs to be performed) from the retrospective component (recognizing the target faces) of prospective memory. Superior prospective-memory performance for cooperator and cheater faces was attributable to a stronger prospective component, whereas the retrospective component remained unaffected. Experiment 3 showed that emotional descriptions of targets were ineffective in increasing prospective memory, suggesting that emotional valence alone cannot account for the prospective-memory advantage found in Experiments 1 and 2. The results suggest that cooperating with someone or being cheated by someone has a strong impact on future-oriented cognition. Enhanced prospective memory for cooperator and cheater faces may have an important function for maintaining reciprocal relationships and for avoiding cheaters. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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

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

Memory as a cognitive requirement for reciprocal cooperation.

Memory has evolved to guide our decisions in the present and to prepare us for future interactions with the environment. Within the social domain, memory can help to decide with whom to cooperate. This provides a unique opportunity to study memory from a functional perspective. Although several lines of research have demonstrated that many forms of reciprocal cooperation require memory, most of the research does not support the assumption of a highly specialized cheater-detection module that specifically serves to promote the detection of uncooperative interaction partners. Instead, the literature supports the flexible recruitment of domain-general guessing and memory mechanisms that serve to continuously predict the future behavior of others based on situational and person-specific factors and use violations of these expectations to update the predictive models of who can be trusted to cooperate in reciprocal interactions.

A multilingual preregistered replication of the semantic mismatch effect on serial recall.

Visual-verbal serial recall is disrupted when task-irrelevant background speech has to be ignored. Contrary to previous suggestion, it has recently been shown that the magnitude of disruption may be accentuated by the semantic properties of the irrelevant speech. Sentences ending with unexpected words that did not match the preceding semantic context were more disruptive than sentences ending with expected words. This particular instantiation of a deviation effect has been termed the semantic mismatch effect. To establish a new phenomenon, it is necessary to show that the effect can be independently replicated and does not depend on specific boundary conditions such as the language of the stimulus material. Here we report a preregistered replication of the semantic mismatch effect in which we examined the effect of unexpected words in 4 different languages (English, French, German, and Swedish) across 4 different laboratories. Participants performed a serial recall task while ignoring sentences with expected or unexpected words that were recorded using text-to-speech software. Independent of language, sentences ending with unexpected words were more disruptive than sentences ending with expected words. In line with previous results, there was no evidence of habituation of the semantic mismatch effect in the form of a decrease in disruption with repeated exposure to the occurrence of unexpected words. The successful replication and extension of the effect to different languages indicates the expression of a general and robust mechanism that reacts to violations of expectancies based on the semantic content of the irrelevant speech. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-protective and self-sacrificing preferences of pedestrians and passengers in moral dilemmas involving autonomous vehicles.

Upon the introduction of autonomous vehicles into daily traffic, it becomes increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles become involved in accident scenarios in which decisions have to be made about how to distribute harm among involved parties. In four experiments, participants made moral decisions from the perspective of a passenger, a pedestrian, or an observer. The results show that the preferred action of an autonomous vehicle strongly depends on perspective. Participants' judgments reflect self-protective tendencies even when utilitarian motives clearly favor one of the available options. However, with an increasing number of lives at stake, utilitarian preferences increased. In a fifth experiment, we tested whether these results were tainted by social desirability but this was not the case. Overall, the results confirm that strong differences exist among passengers, pedestrians, and observers about the preferred course of action in critical incidents. It is therefore important that the actions of autonomous vehicles are not only oriented towards the needs of their passengers, but also take the interests of other road users into account. Even though utilitarian motives cannot fully reconcile the conflicting interests of passengers and pedestrians, there seem to be some moral preferences that a majority of the participants agree upon regardless of their perspective, including the utilitarian preference to save several other lives over one's own.