Mixed News about the Bad News Game.

Basol et al. (2020) tested the "the Bad News Game" (BNG), an app designed to improve ability to spot false claims on social media. Participants rated simulated Tweets, then played either the BNG or an unrelated game, then re-rated the Tweets. Playing the BNG lowered rated belief in false Tweets. Here, four teams of undergraduate psychology students each attempted an extended replication of Basol et al., using updated versions of the original Bad News game. The most important extension was that the replications included a larger number of true Tweets than the original study and planned analyses of responses to true Tweets. The four replications were loosely coordinated, with each team independently working out how to implement the agreed plan. Despite many departures from the Basol et al. method, all four teams replicated their key finding: Playing the BNG reduced belief in false Tweets. But playing the BNG also reduced belief in true Tweets to the same or almost the same extent. Exploratory signal detection theory analyses indicated that the BNG increased response bias but did not improve discrimination. This converges with findings reported by Modirrousta-Galian and Higham (2023).

Subjective experiences of recognizing and not recognizing paintings and words.

In our prior research, average recognition memory response bias tended to be conservative when stimuli were paintings, whereas bias for common English words tended to be liberal or neutral. Efforts to understand the mechanism(s) underlying this materials-based bias effect (MBBE) have yielded new questions but no definitive answers. Here, we report a set of studies exploring the possibility that participants respond more conservatively to paintings because they expect the novel, visually rich paintings to evoke a strong, detailed memory experience at test, whereas the more familiar, visually similar words are not expected to produce this kind of vivid recollection as often. In three studies using variations of the remember/know procedure, we found that correctly recognized paintings were more often reported as "remembered" than were recognized words. There were also parallel materials-based differences in the reported bases for "new" responses. But we did not observe the expected relationships between response bias and these subjective reports. We discuss the implications of these results for accounts of the MBBE, and the more general issue of the role of stimulus materials in recognition memory response bias. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Test position effects on hit and false alarm rates in recognition memory for paintings and words.

When old/new recognition memory is tested with equal numbers of studied and nonstudied items and no rewards or instructions that favour one response over the other, there is no obvious reason for response bias. In line with this, Canadian undergraduates have shown, on average, a neutral response bias when we tested them on recognition of common English words. By contrast, most subjects we have tested on recognition of richly detailed images have shown a conservative bias: they more often erred by missing a studied image than by judging a nonstudied image as studied. Here, in an effort to better understand these materials-based bias effects (MBBEs), we examined changes in hit and false alarm (FA) rates (and in sensitivity and bias) from the first to fourth quartile of a recognition memory test in eight experiments in which undergraduates studied words and/or images of paintings. Response bias for images tended to increase across quartiles, whereas bias for words showed no consistent pattern across quartiles. This pattern could be described as an increase in the MBBE over the course of the test, but the underlying patterns for hits and FAs are not easily reconciled with this interpretation. Hit rates decreased over the course of the test for both materials types, with that decline tending to be steeper for images than words. For words, FA rates tended to increase across quartiles, whereas for paintings FA rates did not increase across quartiles. We discuss implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of the MBBE.

The Confidence Database.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects.

Degree of handedness, emotion, and the perceived duration of auditory stimuli.

Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to accurately judge time intervals, but this ability varies among individuals and across situations. Research suggests that arousal and attentional factors are consistently associated with subjective time distortions, and emotions such as anger, which can elicit arousal and attract attention, have frequently been studied in this context. Typically, viewing angry faces seems to consistently produce time overestimation relative to neutral faces, and the present study investigates the possibility that this effect extends to angry voices by means of a temporal bisection task. Additionally, this paper furthers previous findings that interhemispheric interaction as quantified by handedness strength (i.e., the degree to which one favours one hand over the other) is related to how individuals perceive future time points on an imagined time task, and explores the possibility that handedness strength differences may also manifest as differences in bisection task performance. Results showed that handedness strength was associated with differences in time perception in both objective (bisection) and subjective (imagined) contexts. Bisection task data further revealed that the angry stimulus was associated with decreased temporal sensitivity and a greater propensity to categorise stimuli as "short" as compared to the same stimulus spoken in a neutral voice, which contrasts with studies conducted using angry faces. Possible attentional explanations for these findings and suggestions for future research directions are discussed.