Retracted misinformation often continues to influence event-related reasoning, but there is mixed evidence that it influences person impressions. A recent study found no evidence for the continued influence of retracted misinformation on person impressions across four experiments. However, the study used a dynamic impression-rating measure that may have obscured any continued influence effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has given rise to growing demands for effective intervention strategies that increase sharing discernment (i.e. increase the difference in the probability of sharing true posts relative to the probability of sharing false posts).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
November 2023
ChatGPT is a high-performance large language model that has the potential to significantly improve human-computer interactions. It can provide advice on a range of topics, but it is unclear how good this advice is relative to that provided by competent humans, especially in situations where empathy is required. Here, we report the first investigation of whether ChatGPT's responses are perceived as better than those of humans in a task where humans were attempting to be empathetic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent work has shown that perceptual training can be used to improve the performance of novices in real-world visual classification tasks with medical images, but it is unclear which perceptual training methods are the most effective, especially for difficult medical image discrimination tasks. We investigated several different perceptual training methods with medically naïve participants in a difficult radiology task: identifying the degree of hepatic steatosis (fatty infiltration of the liver) in liver ultrasound images. In Experiment 1a (N = 90), participants completed four sessions of standard perceptual training, and participants in Experiment 1b (N = 71) completed four sessions of comparison training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBuilding on previous research on the use of macroeconomic factors for conflict prediction and using data on political instability provided by the Political Instability Task Force, this article proposes two minimal forecasting models of political instability optimised to have the greatest possible predictive power for one-year and two-year event horizons, while still making predictions that are fully explainable. Both models employ logistic regression and use just three predictors: polity code (a measure of government type), infant mortality, and years of stability (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe propose a novel modeling framework for characterizing the time course of change detection based on information held in visual short-term memory (VSTM). Specifically, we seek to answer whether change detection is better captured by a first-order integration model, in which information is pooled from each location, or a second-order integration model, in which each location is processed independently. We diagnose whether change detection across locations proceeds in serial or parallel and how processing is affected by the stopping rule (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals are often unable to report an attribute of an object to which they recently attended, if they expected to report a different attribute, a phenomenon known as attribute amnesia (AA). To date, all AA studies have occurred in the visual domain. The purpose of this study was to explore the boundary conditions of AA by testing if AA also occurs in the auditory domain and, if so, for which attributes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA common approach to improving probabilistic forecasts is to identify and leverage the forecasts from experts in the crowd based on forecasters' performance on prior questions with known outcomes. However, such information is often unavailable to decision-makers on many forecasting problems, and thus it can be difficult to identify and leverage expertise. In the current paper, we propose a novel algorithm for aggregating probabilistic forecasts using forecasters' meta-predictions about what other forecasters will predict.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current study investigated whether we could encourage Australian residents to become better prepared for floods by inviting them to make a specific commitment to do so. We sampled 374 residents of the state of Victoria (56% male, 81% metropolitan) and 400 residents of the state of New South Wales (45% male, 59% metropolitan) who lived in locations that were potentially at risk of floods. They residents were sampled so that their distributions of ages, genders and living locations were as representative as possible of the population of those two states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe descriptive norm effect refers to findings that individuals will tend to prefer behaving certain ways when they know that other people behave similarly. An open question is whether individuals will still conform to other people's behaviour when they do not identify with these other people, such as a Democrat being biased towards following a popular behaviour amongst Republicans. Self-categorization theory makes the intuitive prediction that people will actively avoid conforming to the norms of groups with which they do not identify.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
January 2020
In this paper, we examine whether information about an item's category, provided by the same dimension type presented across multiple spatial locations (which we term within-dimension features), is processed independently or pooled into a common representation. We use Systems Factorial Technology (SFT; Townsend & Nozawa, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 39, 321-340, 1995) and fit parametric logical rule-based models to diagnose whether information processing is serial, parallel, or coactive. The present work focuses on expanding the scope of categorization response time (RT) models by synthesizing recent work in perceptual categorization with theories of visual attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is well known that individuals tend to copy behaviours that are common among other people-a phenomenon known as the descriptive norm effect. This effect has been successfully used to encourage a range of real-world prosocial decisions, such as increasing organ donor registrations. However, it is still unclear why it occurs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 2016, the gambling habits of a sample of 3361 adults in the state of Victoria, Australia, were surveyed. It was found that a number of factors that were highly correlated with self-reported gambling frequency and gambling problems were not significant predictors of gambling frequency and problem gambling. The major predictors of gambling frequency were the degree to which family members and peers were perceived to gamble, self-reported approval of gambling, the frequency of discussing gambling offline, and the participant's Canadian Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) score.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough Zwaan et al. (2018) have made a compelling case as to why direct replications should occur more frequently than they do, they do not address how such replications attempts can best be encouraged. We propose a novel method for incentivising replication attempts and discuss some issues surrounding its implementation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiagnosing certain fractures in conventional radiographs can be a difficult task, usually taking years to master. Typically, students are trained ad-hoc, in a primarily-rule based fashion. Our study investigated whether students can more rapidly learn to diagnose proximal neck of femur fractures via perceptual training, without having to learn an explicit set of rules.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttribute amnesia is the counterintuitive phenomenon where observers are unable to report a salient aspect of a stimulus (e.g., its colour or its identity) immediately after the stimulus was presented, despite both attending to and processing the stimulus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
August 2017
Can observers determine the gist of a natural scene in a purely feedforward manner, or does this process require deliberation and feedback? Observers can recognise images that are presented for very brief periods of time before being masked. It is unclear whether this recognition process occurs in a purely feedforward manner or whether feedback from higher cortical areas to lower cortical areas is necessary. The current study revealed that the minimum presentation time required to identify or to determine the gist of a natural scene was no different from that required to determine the orientation or colour of an isolated line.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo understand how the visual system represents multiple moving objects and how those representations contribute to tracking, it is essential that we understand how the processes of attention and working memory interact. In the work described here we present an investigation of that interaction via a series of tracking and working memory dual-task experiments. Previously, it has been argued that tracking is resistant to disruption by a concurrent working memory task and that any apparent disruption is in fact due to observers making a response to the working memory task, rather than due to competition for shared resources.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn daily life, we make decisions that are associated with probabilistic outcomes (e.g., the chance of rain today).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBreast screening is an important tool for the early detection of breast cancers. However, tumours are typically present in less than 1% of mammograms. This low prevalence could cause radiologists to detect fewer tumours than they otherwise would, an issue known as the prevalence effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople look at what they are interested in, and their emotional expressions tend to indicate how they feel about the objects at which they look. The combination of gaze direction and emotional expression can therefore convey important information about people's evaluations of the objects in their environment, and can even influence the subsequent evaluations of those objects by a third party, a phenomenon known as the emotional gaze effect. The present study extended research into the effect of emotional gaze cues by investigating whether they affect evaluations of the most important aspect of our social environment-other people-and whether the presence of multiple gaze cues enhances this effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe human visual system has the remarkable ability to rapidly detect meaning from visual stimuli. Potter, Wyble, Hagmann, and McCourt (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76, 270-279, 2014) tested the minimum viewing time required to obtain meaning from a stream of pictures shown in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sequence containing either six or 12 pictures. They reported that observers could detect the presence of a target picture specified by name (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModels of human decision-making aim to simultaneously explain the similarity, attraction, and compromise effects. However, evidence that people show all three effects within the same paradigm has come from studies in which choices were averaged over participants. This averaging is only justified if those participants show qualitatively similar choice behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Brain Sci
January 2016
In this commentary, we present two examples where perception is not only influenced by, but also in fact driven by, top-down effects: hallucinations and mental imagery. Crucially, both examples avoid all six of the potential confounds that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) raised as arguments against previous studies claiming to demonstrate the influence of top-down effects on perception.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerformance on a range of visual-processing tasks has been shown to improve when information is split bilaterally across the left and right visual hemifields rather than being restricted to a single visual hemifield. However, a recent study by Delvenne et al. found no such bilateral advantage for subitizing, which is our ability to rapidly and accurately enumerate small quantities of objects.
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