Effects of outlier and familiar context in trend-line estimates in scatterplots.

Lately, there has been a growing fascination with blending research on visualizing data and understanding how our basic visual perception works. Taking this path, this research delved into the connection between ensemble perception, which involves quickly and accurately grasping essential information from sets of visually similar objects, and how we process scatterplots. Across two experiments, we aimed to answer a couple of connected questions. First, we investigated whether having an outlier in a scatterplot affects how people draw trend-line estimates. Second, we explored whether what we are familiar with and the presence of outliers that match the trend affect how we draw trend-line estimates in scatterplots. In both experiments, we showed participants scatterplots for a short time, manipulating whether there were outliers or not. Then, using a computer mouse, participants drew their trend-line estimates. By comparing what they drew with possible trend-line solutions, we discovered that when there is no context, the outlier and the other points in a scatterplot are seen as equally important in drawing the trend-line estimate. But when the scatterplot depicted a familiar context and the outlier fitted the trend, people tended to give more weight to those outlier points in their drawings. This suggested that what we already believe can sway how we draw trend-line estimates even from quickly shown scatterplots.

Understanding patterns of accumulation: Improving forecast-based decisions via nudging.

In this study we investigated challenges associated with comprehension of graphical patterns of accumulation (Experiment 1) and how to improve accumulation-based reasoning via nudging (Experiment 2). On each trial participants were presented with two separate graphs, each depicting a linear, saturating, or exponential data trajectory. They were then asked to make a binary decision based on their forecasts of how these trends would evolve. Correct responses were associated with a focus on the rate of increase in graphs; incorrect responses were driven by prior knowledge and beliefs regarding the context and/or selective attention towards the early phases of the line trajectories. To encourage participants to think more critically and accurately about the presented data, in Experiment 2, participants completed a nudge phase: they either made a forecast about a near horizon or read particular values on the studied trajectories prior to making their decisions. Forecasting about how the studied trajectories would progress led to improvements in determining expected accumulation growth. Merely reading values on the existing trajectory did not lead to improvements in decision accuracy. We demonstrate that actively asking participants to make specific forecasts prior to making decisions based on the accumulation trajectories improves decision accuracy.

The role of culture and semantic organization in working memory updating.

Westerners tend to relate items in a categorical manner, whereas Easterners focus more on functional relationships. The present study extended research on semantic organization in long-term memory to working memory. First, Americans' and Turks' preferences for categorical versus functional relationships were tested. Second, working memory interference was assessed using a 2-back working memory paradigm in which lure items were categorically and functionally related to targets. Next, a mediation model tested direct effects of culture and semantic organization on working memory task behaviour, and the indirect effect, whether semantic organization mediated the relationship between culture and working memory interference. Whereas Americans had slower response times to correctly rejecting functional lures compared to categorical lures, conditions did not differ for Turks. However, semantic organization did not mediate cultural difference in working memory interference. Across cultures, there was evidence that semantic organization affected working memory errors, with individuals who endorsed categorical more than functional pairings committing more categorical than functional errors on the 2-back task. Results align with prior research suggesting individual differences in use of different types of semantic relationships, and further that literature by indicating effects on interference in working memory. However, these individual differences may not be culture-dependent.

The impact of group identity on the interaction between collective memory and collective future thinking negativity: Evidence from a Turkish sample.

Although several studies have addressed the relationship between memories and future projections regarding personal events, only a few studies exist on collective past and future events, almost all with North American samples. In two studies with Turkish samples, we investigated the relationship between sociopolitical identity and collective past and future representations. In Study 1, we compared the most important past and future collective events generated by voters of the ruling and the main opposition parties. Participants reported the two most important public events in the last 70 years and two in the next 70 years for Turkey, and rated events' valence, centrality, and transitional impact. Past events were dominated by national political events whereas future events' themes were more varied. Past events were also more negative than future events, with the negativity of future events decreasing as their temporal distance from the present increased. Opposition voters rated both the past and the future events more negatively than ruling party voters. In Study 2, we tested whether the negativity for future events may be due to perceived sociopolitical status of ruling party voters. Participants reported events from Turkey's future and provided ratings of status and privilege. We replicated the reduced negativity of distant compared to near future projections, but subjective sense of privilege was not related to events' valence. Overall, we demonstrated that in highly polarized societies, sociopolitical identity can impact the perceived valence of collective mental time travel outputs, diverging from findings of similar responses among Democrats and Republicans in the USA context.

How well do ordinary Americans forecast the growth of COVID-19?

Across three experiments (N = 1565), we investigated how forecasts about the spread of COVID 19 are impacted by data trends, and whether patterns of misestimation predict adherence to social-distancing guidelines. We also investigated how mode of data presentation influences forecasting of future cases by showing participants data on the number of COVID-19 cases from a 5-week period in either graphical, tabular, or text-only form. We consistently found that people shown tables produced more accurate forecasts compared to people shown line-graphs of the same data; yet people shown line-graphs were more confident in their estimates. These findings suggest that graphs engender false-confidence in the accuracy of forecasts, that people's forecasts of future cases have important implications for their attitudes concerning social distancing, and that tables may be better than graphs for informing the public about the trajectory of COVID-19.

Stability and change in the organisation of collective memory representations.

In this study, we investigated the impact of a highly consequential public event, the July 15 Coup Attempt, on the structure and organisation of events in Turkish collective memory. To do this, we followed up on our earlier work (Mutlutürk, Tekcan, & Boduroglu, 2021) that used the multidimensional scaling approach to identify critical dimensions in public event representational space. Participants rated the similarity of 15 key public events in a pairwise fashion, across three waves of data collection. They were also asked to report for which political party they had voted in the most recent election. We replicated our earlier results that public events were distinguished based on their political and nonpolitical characteristics; political events were clustered based on their specific attributes. Despite substantial stability in the organisation of collective memories across three time points, the post-coup representational space among voters of the ruling party changed, eliminating clusters within the political dimension and resulting in the ruling party achieving a central and anchor status. These findings suggest that, transformative events may have the potential to impact the structure and organisation of collective memory representations and sociopolitical identity may have to do with the stability of collective memories.

Cultural differences in categorical memory errors persist with age.

OBJECTIVES: This cross-sectional experiment examined the influence of aging on cross-cultural differences in memory errors. Previous research revealed that Americans committed more categorical memory errors than Turks; we tested whether the cognitive constraints associated with aging impacted the pattern of memory errors across cultures. Furthermore, older adults are vulnerable to memory errors for semantically-related information, and we assessed whether this tendency occurs across cultures. METHODS: Younger and older adults from the US and Turkey studied word pairs, with some pairs sharing a categorical relationship and some unrelated. Participants then completed a cued recall test, generating the word that was paired with the first. These responses were scored for correct responses or different types of errors, including categorical and semantic. RESULTS: The tendency for Americans to commit more categorical memory errors emerged for both younger and older adults. In addition, older adults across cultures committed more memory errors, and these were for semantically-related information (including both categorical and other types of semantic errors). CONCLUSION: Heightened vulnerability to memory errors with age extends across cultural groups, and Americans' proneness to commit categorical memory errors occurs across ages. The findings indicate some robustness in the ways that age and culture influence memory errors.

Culture impacts the magnitude of the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect.

The present study assessed the extent to which culture impacts the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect. This trade-off effect occurs because emotional items are better remembered than neutral ones, but this advantage comes at the expense of memory for backgrounds such that neutral backgrounds are remembered worse when they occurred with an emotional item than with a neutral one. Cultures differ in their prioritisation of focal object versus contextual background information, with Westerners focusing more on objects and Easterners focusing more on backgrounds. Americans, a Western culture, and Turks, an Eastern-influenced culture, incidentally encoded positive, negative, and neutral items placed against neutral backgrounds, and then completed a surprise memory test with the items and backgrounds tested separately. Results revealed a reduced trade-off for Turks compared to Americans. Although both groups exhibited an emotional enhancement in item memory, Turks did not show a decrement in memory for backgrounds that had been paired with emotional items. These findings complement prior ones showing reductions in trade-off effects as a result of task instructions. Here, we suggest that a contextual-focus at the level of culture can mitigate trade-off effects in emotional memory.

Life-span retrieval of public events: Reminiscence bump for high-impact events, recency for others.

Although substantial evidence exists showing a reliable reminiscence bump for personal events, data regarding retrieval distributions for public events have been equivocal. The primary aim of the present study was to address life-span retrieval distributions of different types of public events in comparison to personal events, and to test whether the existing accounts of the bump can explain the distribution of public events. We asked a large national sample to report the most important, happiest, and saddest personal events and the most important, happiest, saddest, most proud, most fearful, and most shameful public events. We found a robust bump corresponding to the third decade of life for the happiest and the most important positive but not for the saddest and most important negative personal events. For the most important public events, a bump emerged only for the two most frequently mentioned events. Distributions of public events cued with emotions were marked by recency. These results point to potential differences in retrieval of important personal and public events. While the life-script framework well accounts for the findings regarding important personal events, a chronologically retroactive search seem to guide retrieval of public events. Reminiscence bump observed for the two public events suggest that age-at-event affects recall of public events to the degree that the events are high-impact ones that dominate nation's collective memory. Results provide further evidence that the bump is not unitary and points to importance of event type and memory elicitation method with regard to competing explanations of the phenomenon.

Effects of self-referencing on feeling-of-knowing accuracy and recollective experience.

The current research investigated the impact of self-referencing (SR) on feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgements to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these metamemory judgements and specifically test the relationship between recollective experiences and FOK accuracy within the accessibility framework FOK judgements are thought to be by-products of the retrieval process and are therefore closely related to memory performance. Because relating information to one's self is one of the factors enhancing memory performance, we investigated the effect of self-related encoding on FOK accuracy and recollective experience. We compared performance on this condition to a separate deep processing condition in which participants reported the frequency of occurrence of pairs of words. Participants encoded pairs of words incidentally, and following a delay interval, they attempted at retrieving each target prompted by its cue. Then, they were re-presented with all cues and asked to provide FOK ratings regarding their likelihood of recognising the targets amongst distractors. Finally, they were given a surprise recognition task in which following each response they identified whether the response was remembered, known or just guessed. Our results showed that only SR at encoding resulted in better memory, higher FOK accuracy and increased recollective experience.

Temporal integration of target features across and within trials in the attentional blink.

Attentional blink research has typically investigated attentional limitations in multiple target processing. The current study investigated the temporal integration of target features in the attentional blink. Across two experiments, we demonstrated that the orientation estimations of individual target items in the attentional blink paradigm were systematically biased. Specifically, there was evidence for both within- and across-trial biases, revealing a general bias towards previously presented stimuli. Moreover, both biases were found to be more salient for targets suffering from the attentional blink. The current study is the first to demonstrate an across-trial bias in responses in the attentional blink paradigm. This set of findings is in line with the literature, suggesting that the human visual system can implicitly summarize information presented over time, which may lead to biases. By investigating temporal integration in the attentional blink, we have been able to address the modulatory role of attention on biases imposed by the implicit temporal effects in estimation tasks. Our findings may inform future research on attentional blink, serial dependence, and ensemble perception.

Icon arrays reduce concern over COVID-19 vaccine side effects: a randomized control study.

On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~ 0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this announcement increased vaccine hesitancy among the American public. Two days after the CDC's announcement, we administered a survey to a group of 2,046 Americans to assess their changes in attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. The aim of this study was to investigate whether viewing icon arrays of side effect risk would prevent increases in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy due to the announcement. We found that using icon arrays to illustrate the small chance of experiencing the blood clotting side effect significantly prevented increases in aversion toward the Johnson and Johnson vaccine as well as all other COVID-19 vaccines.

Variability leads to overestimation of mean summaries.

Research on ensemble perception has shown that people can extract both mean and variance information, but much less is understand how these two different types of summaries interact with one another. Some research has argued that people are more erroneous in extracting the mean of displays that have greater variability. In all three experiments, we manipulated the variability in the displays. Participants reported the mean size of a set of circles (Experiment 1) and mean length of horizontally placed (Experiment 2a) and randomly oriented lines (Experiment 2b). In all experiments, we found that mean size estimations were more erroneous for higher than smaller variance displays. More critically, there was a tendency to overestimate the mean, driven by variance in both task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. We discuss these findings in relation to limitations in concurrent summarization ability and outlier discounting in ensemble perception.

Contributions of ensemble perception to outlier representation precision.

It is known that the visual system can efficiently extract mean and variance information, facilitating the detection of outliers. However, no research to date has directly investigated whether ensemble perception mechanisms contribute to outlier representation precision. We specifically were interested in how the distinctiveness of outliers impacts their precision. Across two experiments, we compared how accurately viewers represented the orientation of spatial outliers that varied in distinctiveness and found that increased outlier distinctiveness resulted in greater precision. Based on comparisons of our data to simulations reflecting particular selective strategies, we eliminated the possibility that participants were selectively processing the outlier, at the expense of the ensemble. Thus, we argued that participants separately represented distinct outliers along with ensemble summaries of the remaining items in a display. We also found that outlier distinctiveness moderated the precision of how the remaining items were summarized. We discuss these findings in relation to computational capacity and constraints of ensemble perception mechanisms.

Cultural differences in performance on Eriksen's flanker task.

Eriksen's zoom model of attention implies a trade-off between the breadth and resolution of representations of information. Following this perspective, we used Eriksen's flanker task to investigate culture's influence on attentional allocation and attentional resolution. In Experiment 1, the spatial distance of the flankers was varied to test whether people from Eastern cultures (here, Turks) experienced more interference than people from Western cultures (here, Americans) when flankers were further from the target. In Experiment 2, the contrast of the flankers was varied. The pattern of results shows that congruency of the flankers (Experiment 1) as well as the degree of contrast of the flankers compared with the target (Experiment 2) interact with participants' cultural background to differentially influence accuracy or reaction times. In addition, we used evidence accumulation modeling to jointly consider measures of speed and accuracy. Results indicate that to make decisions in the Eriksen flanker task, Turks both accumulate evidence faster and require more evidence than Americans do. These cultural differences in visual attention and decision-making have implications for a wide variety of cognitive processes.

Feature-specificity in visual statistical summary processing.

Visual statistical summary processing enables people to extract the average feature of a set of items rapidly and accurately. Previous studies have demonstrated independent mechanisms for summarizing low (e.g. color, orientation) and high-level (facial identity, emotion) visual information. However, no study to date has conclusively determined whether there are feature-specific summarization mechanisms for low-level features or whether there are low-level, feature agnostic summarization mechanisms. To address this issue, we asked participants to report either the average orientation or the average size from a set of lines where both features varied. Participants completed these tasks either in single-task or mixed-task conditions; in the latter, successful performance required extraction of both summaries concurrently. If there were feature-specific summarization mechanisms that could operate in parallel, then errors in mean size and mean orientation tasks should be independent, in both single and mixed task conditions. On the other hand, a central domain-general mechanism for low-level summarization would imply a correlation between errors for both features and greater error in the mixed than single task trials. In Experiment 1, we found that there was no correlation between the mean size and mean orientation errors and performance was similar across single and mixed-task conditions, suggesting that there may be independent summarization mechanisms for size and orientation features. To further test the feature-specificity account, in Experiment 2 and 3 (with mask), we manipulated the display duration to determine whether there were any differences in the summarization of earlier (orientation) vs. later (size) features. While these experiments replicated the pattern of results observed in Experiment 1, at shorter display durations, no differences emerged across features. We argue that our data is consistent with independent, multi-level feature-specific statistical summary mechanisms for low-level visual features.

Statistical summary representations of bound features.

The visual system can efficiently summarize various lower-level and higher-level features of ensembles. However, no research to date has directly investigated how different features interact with each other within a single summary and whether people can efficiently report an integrated summary of two feature dimensions. In the first two experiments, we specifically investigated whether individuals can integrate spatial and size information to report a bound spatial summary, the center of mass (CoM), as efficiently as the centroid, which is devoid of size information. Both experiments revealed that viewers were equally accurate in extracting the centroid and the CoM, with the size distribution inadvertently affecting the centroid estimates. In the final experiment, we investigated whether encouraging observers to attend to individual item size would cause the centroid estimates to be biased toward the CoM. When item size was task-irrelevant, as in the centroid task, observers were able to selectively focus on spatial location, eliminating any impact from the size distribution. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that viewers are capable of extracting integrated summaries, possibly through a mechanism that allows them to represent the spatial distribution of sizes. We discuss possible mechanisms that may support the extraction of integrated summaries, and highlight the need to consider multilevel mechanisms extending beyond simple feature- and object-based mechanisms.

Effects of spatial configurations on visual change detection: an account of bias changes.

In order to determine whether people encode spatial configuration information when encoding visual displays, in four experiments, we investigated whether changes in task-irrelevant spatial configuration information would influence color change detection accuracy. In a change detection task, when objects in the test display were presented in new random locations, rather than identical or different locations preserving the overall configuration, participants were more likely to report that the colors had changed. This consistent bias across four experiments suggested that people encode task-irrelevant spatial configuration along with object information. Experiment 4 also demonstrated that only a low-false-alarm group of participants effectively bound spatial configuration information to object information, suggesting that these types of binding processes are open to strategic influences.

Cultural Differences in Allocation of Attention in Visual Information Processing.

Previous research has shown that when processing visual scenes, Westerners attend to salient objects and East Asians attend to the relationships between focal objects and background elements. It is possible that cross-cultural differences in attentional allocation contribute to these earlier findings. In this article, the authors investigate cultural differences in attentional allocation in two experiments, using a visual change detection paradigm. They demonstrate that East Asians are better than Americans at detecting color changes when a layout of a set of colored blocks is expanded to cover a wider region and worse when it is shrunk. East Asians are also slower than Americans are at detecting changes in the center of the screen. The data suggest that East Asians allocate their attention more broadly than Americans. The authors consider potential factors that may contribute to the development of such attention allocation differences.

Impact of spatial grouping on mean size estimation.

People represent summary statistics of visual scenes, but it is not fully clear whether such summary statistics are extracted automatically. To determine whether different levels of summary representation (i.e., at the perceptual-group or the entire-display level) may be formed differently, in two experiments we investigated how people extracted summary statistics for displays consisting of spatially segregated groups. Participants were asked to report the mean sizes of either entire sets or perceptual groups in precue and postcue conditions. There was no precueing advantage in the mean size estimations of entire sets. However, when these precues identified target perceptual groups, participants reported the perceptual-group means more accurately than when postcues were used. In the postcue condition, participants were biased toward the entire-set mean even when they were probed to report the perceptual-group mean. There was also greater bias toward the entire-set mean for more erroneous perceptual-group summaries. These findings suggest that ensemble representations are extracted more efficiently for the whole than for the perceptual parts and that ensemble perception is not a uniform process across perceptual groups and entire sets.