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Journal of Vision May 2024In everyday life we frequently make simple visual judgments about object properties, for example, how big or wide is a certain object? Our goal is to test whether there...
In everyday life we frequently make simple visual judgments about object properties, for example, how big or wide is a certain object? Our goal is to test whether there are also task-specific oculomotor routines that support perceptual judgments, similar to the well-established exploratory routines for haptic perception. In a first study, observers saw different scenes with two objects presented in a photorealistic virtual reality environment. Observers were asked to judge which of two objects was taller or wider while gaze was tracked. All tasks were performed with the same set of virtual objects in the same scenes, so that we can compare spatial characteristics of exploratory gaze behavior to quantify oculomotor routines for each task. Width judgments showed fixations around the center of the objects with larger horizontal spread. In contrast, for height judgments, gaze was shifted toward the top of the objects with larger vertical spread. These results suggest specific strategies in gaze behavior that presumably are used for perceptual judgments. To test the causal link between oculomotor behavior and perception, in a second study, observers could freely gaze at the object or we introduced a gaze-contingent setup forcing observers to fixate specific positions on the object. Discrimination performance was similar between free-gaze and the gaze-contingent conditions for width and height judgments. These results suggest that although gaze is adapted for different tasks, performance seems to be based on a perceptual strategy, independent of potential cues that can be provided by the oculomotor system.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Male; Female; Adult; Eye Movements; Young Adult; Fixation, Ocular; Photic Stimulation; Virtual Reality; Visual Perception
PubMed: 38709511
DOI: 10.1167/jov.24.5.3 -
Journal of Experimental Psychology.... Sep 2018Humans have great difficulty comparing quotients including fractions, proportions, and probabilities and often erroneously isolate the whole numbers of the numerators...
Humans have great difficulty comparing quotients including fractions, proportions, and probabilities and often erroneously isolate the whole numbers of the numerators and denominators to compare them. Some have argued that the whole number bias is a compensatory strategy to deal with difficult comparisons. We examined adult humans' preferences for gambles that differed only in numerosity, and not in factors that influence their expected value (probabilities and stakes). Subjects consistently preferred gambles with more winning balls to ones with fewer, even though the probabilities were mathematically identical, replicating prior results. In a second experiment, we found that subjects accurately represented the relative probabilities of the choice options during rapid nonverbal probability judgments but nonetheless showed biases based on whole numbers. We mathematically formalized and quantitatively evaluated cognitive rules based on existing hypotheses that attempt to explain subjects' whole number biases during quotient comparisons. The results show that the whole number bias is intrinsic to the way humans solve quotient comparisons rather than a compensatory strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Mathematical Concepts; Models, Theoretical; Probability; Young Adult
PubMed: 29939047
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000544 -
Scientific Reports May 2024Vocal attractiveness influences important social outcomes. While most research on the acoustic parameters that influence vocal attractiveness has focused on the possible...
Vocal attractiveness influences important social outcomes. While most research on the acoustic parameters that influence vocal attractiveness has focused on the possible roles of sexually dimorphic characteristics of voices, such as fundamental frequency (i.e., pitch) and formant frequencies (i.e., a correlate of body size), other work has reported that increasing vocal averageness increases attractiveness. Here we investigated the roles these three characteristics play in judgments of the attractiveness of male and female voices. In Study 1, we found that increasing vocal averageness significantly decreased distinctiveness ratings, demonstrating that participants could detect manipulations of vocal averageness in this stimulus set and using this testing paradigm. However, in Study 2, we found no evidence that increasing averageness significantly increased attractiveness ratings of voices. In Study 3, we found that fundamental frequency was negatively correlated with male vocal attractiveness and positively correlated with female vocal attractiveness. By contrast with these results for fundamental frequency, vocal attractiveness and formant frequencies were not significantly correlated. Collectively, our results suggest that averageness may not necessarily significantly increase attractiveness judgments of voices and are consistent with previous work reporting significant associations between attractiveness and voice pitch.
Topics: Humans; Male; Female; Voice; Adult; Young Adult; Beauty; Judgment; Adolescent
PubMed: 38714709
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-61064-9 -
Journal of Experimental Psychology.... Feb 2017Conflict has been hypothesized to play a key role in recruiting deliberative processing in reasoning and judgment tasks. This claim suggests that changing the task so as...
Conflict has been hypothesized to play a key role in recruiting deliberative processing in reasoning and judgment tasks. This claim suggests that changing the task so as to add incorrect heuristic responses that conflict with existing heuristic responses can make individuals less likely to respond heuristically and can increase response accuracy. We tested this prediction in experiments involving judgments of argument strength and word frequency, and found that participants are more likely to avoid heuristic bias and respond correctly in settings with 2 incorrect heuristic response options compared with similar settings with only 1 heuristic response option. Our results provide strong evidence for conflict as a mechanism influencing the interaction between heuristic and deliberative thought, and illustrate how accuracy can be increased through simple changes to the response sets offered to participants. (PsycINFO Database Record
Topics: Adult; Bias; Conflict, Psychological; Female; Heuristics; Humans; Judgment; Male; Reaction Time; Vocabulary; Young Adult
PubMed: 27685023
DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000307 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Oct 2023In three experiments, we conceptually replicated and extended the spillover bias in judgments of diversity that was first reported by Daniels et al. (2017,...
In three experiments, we conceptually replicated and extended the spillover bias in judgments of diversity that was first reported by Daniels et al. (2017, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 139, 92-105). In the first experiment, we showed that judgments of the ethnoracial diversity of groups of people were affected by the gender diversity of those people. In the second experiment, we extended this result to nonsocial stimuli by showing that judgments of the size diversity and size variability of groups of circles were affected by the color diversity of those circles. In the third experiment, we showed that judgments of the ethnoracial diversity of groups of people were affected by the color diversity of a group of circles in the background. These results suggest that diversity spillover bias is an extremely general phenomenon that occurs for both social and nonsocial judgments of diversity and variability. We propose that it occurs because people use the overall perceived diversity in a set of stimuli as a cue to judge diversity on any specific dimension.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Bias
PubMed: 36914912
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-023-02259-5 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Jun 2022People rate and judge repeated information more true than novel information. This truth-by-repetition effect is of relevance for explaining belief in fake news,...
People rate and judge repeated information more true than novel information. This truth-by-repetition effect is of relevance for explaining belief in fake news, conspiracy theories, or misinformation effects. To ascertain whether increased motivation could reduce this effect, we tested the influence of monetary incentives on participants' truth judgments. We used a standard truth paradigm, consisting of a presentation and judgment phase with factually true and false information, and incentivized every truth judgment. Monetary incentives may influence truth judgments in two ways. First, participants may rely more on relevant knowledge, leading to better discrimination between true and false statements. Second, participants may rely less on repetition, leading to a lower bias to respond "true." We tested these predictions in a preregistered and high-powered experiment. However, incentives did not influence the percentage of "true" judgments or correct responses in general, despite participants' longer response times in the incentivized conditions and evidence for knowledge about the statements. Our findings show that even monetary consequences do not protect against the truth-by-repetition effect, further substantiating its robustness and relevance and highlighting its potential hazardous effects when used in purposeful misinformation.
Topics: Communication; Humans; Judgment; Knowledge; Motivation; Reaction Time
PubMed: 34918280
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-021-02046-0 -
Consciousness and Cognition May 2023Metacognition in working memory (WM) has received less attention than episodic memory, and few studies have investigated confidence judgements while carrying out a...
Metacognition in working memory (WM) has received less attention than episodic memory, and few studies have investigated confidence judgements while carrying out a verbal WM task. The present study investigated whether individuals are aware of their own level of performance while carrying out an ongoing verbal WM task, and whether judgments of confidence are sensitive to factors that determine WM performance. A verbal n-back task was adapted to obtain confidence judgments on a trial-by-trial basis. Memory load and lure interference were manipulated. Results showed that metacognition judgments were affected by memory load and levels of interference just as performance accuracy. Even when judgments were sensitive to memory factors, participants were overconfident and generally showed poor metacognitive accuracy at discriminating between erroneous and accurate responses. Results are discussed in terms of possible cues contributing to metacognitive judgements during an ongoing WM task and reasons for WM metacognitive accuracy.
Topics: Humans; Metacognition; Memory, Short-Term; Judgment; Cognition; Awareness
PubMed: 37087901
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2023.103522 -
Annals of the New York Academy of... May 2017Neuroscientific investigations interested in questions of person perception and impression formation have traditionally asked their participants to observe and evaluate... (Review)
Review
Neuroscientific investigations interested in questions of person perception and impression formation have traditionally asked their participants to observe and evaluate isolated individuals. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of studies presenting third-party encounters between two (or more) individuals as stimuli. Owing to this subtle methodological change, the brain's capacity to understand other people's interactions and relationships from limited visual information--also known as people watching--has become a distinct topic of inquiry. Though initial evidence indicates that this capacity relies on several well-known networks of the social brain (including the person-perception network, the action-observation network, and the mentalizing network), a comprehensive framework of people watching must overcome three major challenges. First, it must develop a taxonomy of judgments that people habitually make when witnessing the encounters of others. Second, it must clarify which visual cues give rise to these encounter-based judgments. Third, it must elucidate how and why several brain networks work together to accomplish these judgments. To advance all three lines of research, we summarize what is currently known as well as what remains to be studied about the neuroscience of people watching.
Topics: Brain; Cognition; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Judgment; Neurosciences; Sensation; Social Behavior
PubMed: 28405964
DOI: 10.1111/nyas.13331 -
Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral... Aug 2023People need to adapt to situations where they experience sequential benefits (or losses) to ensure survival. This study investigated the neural substrates involved in...
People need to adapt to situations where they experience sequential benefits (or losses) to ensure survival. This study investigated the neural substrates involved in judgments of sequential benefits and losses. A total of 29 healthy volunteers participated in this study, in which they were asked to participate in a game of purchasing stocks while a magnetic resonance imaging scan was performed. This game had two main types of trials: (1) participants received four sequential financial benefits (or losses), and (2) participants received an equal amount of benefits (or losses) immediately. The results showed greater activation of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) when four benefits were received sequentially than when an equal amount of benefits was received immediately. This indicates that the OFC plays a crucial role in the process of mental integration of sequential benefits and interpretation of their valuations. It also showed greater activation of the dorsal striatum when four sequental losses were received than when an equal amount of losses was received immediately. However, it cannot be concluded that activation of the dorsal striatum reflects the differences between sequential and immediate losses, because previous studies have not confirmed this perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the function of the striatum in processing these losses.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Prefrontal Cortex; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Brain Mapping
PubMed: 37347352
DOI: 10.3758/s13415-023-01087-3 -
Acta Psychologica Mar 2016This article reports a meta-analytic review of seven extant experiments, with 235 participants, concerning effects of physical workload on duration judgments. It also... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis Review
This article reports a meta-analytic review of seven extant experiments, with 235 participants, concerning effects of physical workload on duration judgments. It also provides a qualitative assessment of related studies that, for specific reasons, were not includable in the quantitative meta-analysis. All analyzed experiments used the prospective duration-judgment paradigm and the production method, in which participants knew in advance that duration estimation was required. A large overall effect size reveals that increasing physical workload results in longer prospective duration productions. Physical workload effects are comparable to those of cognitive load. Implications for applied research, theory, and applications are discussed.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Psychomotor Performance; Time Perception
PubMed: 26922615
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.01.002