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PloS One 2023The general knowledge questions introduced by Nelson and Narens (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(3), 338-368, 1980) have been a valuable research tool...
The general knowledge questions introduced by Nelson and Narens (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(3), 338-368, 1980) have been a valuable research tool in various areas of cognitive research. We translated, updated, and expanded the set of questions for German. We present a total set of 356 general knowledge questions with their recall probability as well as metacognitive measures-confidence and peer judgments-based on a university student sample (N = 512). Furthermore, we present response latencies, pairwise correlations between recall probability and metacognitive judgments as well as the most common commission errors. These general knowledge questions can be used in studies with German speaking participants in a broad range of research fields, such as memory, illusory truth, misinformation, and metacognitive processes.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Mental Recall; Metacognition; Verbal Learning; Reaction Time
PubMed: 36749739
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281305 -
Cognition & Emotion Jun 2019Feelings and cognitions influence judgment through attribution. For instance, the attribution of positive feelings and cognitions to a stimulus leads to a positive...
Feelings and cognitions influence judgment through attribution. For instance, the attribution of positive feelings and cognitions to a stimulus leads to a positive judgment of that stimulus. We examined whether misattribution is moderated by the applicability of a distractor to the judgment question. For instance, when are people more likely to attribute to a target person the affective and cognitive experiences triggered by a kitten - when trying to judge the person's cuteness or trustworthiness? The kitten triggers experiences specifically relevant to cuteness, but people might more easily suspect the kitten's potential influence when judging cuteness rather than trustworthiness. Using the Affect Misattribution Procedure, we found that applicability increases the effect of misattribution on valenced judgments. The results emphasise the importance of specific information (rather than only general valence) in attribution and suggest that high applicability of distractors to the judgment question does not elicit effective correction.
Topics: Adult; Animals; Cats; Cognition; Cues; Emotions; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Social Perception
PubMed: 29999483
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2018.1498322 -
Memory & Cognition Feb 2021Being exposed to inaccurate information in fiction can negatively influence post-reading judgments and decisions. For example, people make more errors judging the...
Being exposed to inaccurate information in fiction can negatively influence post-reading judgments and decisions. For example, people make more errors judging the validity of statements after reading stories containing related inaccurate as compared to related accurate assertions. While these effects have been demonstrated in a variety of studies, people's confidence in their post-reading judgments has received little attention. The current experiments examined whether exposure to accurate and inaccurate information embedded in fiction influences readers' confidence in judging the validity of related claims. Participants read an extended story containing accurate and inaccurate assertions about the world (Experiment 1a) or a control story omitting those assertions (Experiment 1b). Afterwards they judged the validity of single statements related to the critical assertions and provided confidence ratings for each judgment. While participants made more judgment errors after having read inaccurate assertions than after having read accurate assertions or stories without assertions, they were overall less confident in their incorrect as compared to correct judgments. Given the observed relationship between confidence and judgment accuracy, in Experiments 2 and 3 we tested whether allowing and instructing participants to withhold responses might reduce judgment errors. This withholding option reduced participants' incorrect and correct judgments, failing to specifically eliminate the negative consequences of exposure to inaccurate assertions. These findings are discussed with respect to accounts documenting the influence of inaccurate information, and highlight confidence as a relevant but understudied factor in previous empirical demonstrations of such effects.
Topics: Attention; Comprehension; Humans; Judgment; Reading
PubMed: 32964382
DOI: 10.3758/s13421-020-01096-4 -
PloS One 2020Self-agency, the sense that one is the author or owner of one's behaviors, is impaired in multiple psychological and neurological disorders, including functional... (Clinical Trial)
Clinical Trial
Self-agency, the sense that one is the author or owner of one's behaviors, is impaired in multiple psychological and neurological disorders, including functional movement disorders, Parkinson's Disease, alien hand syndrome, schizophrenia, and dystonia. Existing assessments of self-agency, many of which focus on agency of movement, can be prohibitively time-consuming and often yield ambiguous results. Here, we introduce a short online motion tracking task that quantifies movement agency through both first-order perceptual and second-order metacognitive judgments. The task assesses the degree to which a participant can distinguish between a motion stimulus whose trajectory is influenced by the participant's cursor movements and a motion stimulus whose trajectory is random. We demonstrate the task's reliability in healthy participants and discuss how its efficiency, reliability, and ease of online implementation make it a promising new tool for both diagnosing and understanding disorders of agency.
Topics: Adult; Hand; Humans; Judgment; Male; Metacognition; Movement; Psychomotor Performance
PubMed: 33347502
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244113 -
Social Cognitive and Affective... Mar 2021How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of...
How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of depicted unfamiliar persons from websites of trusted or distrusted well-known German news media. As a consequence, persons paired with negative or positive headlines were judged more negative or positive than persons associated with neutral information independent of source credibility. Likewise, electrophysiological signatures of slow and controlled evaluative brain activity revealed a dominant influence of emotional headline contents regardless of credibility. Modulations of earlier brain responses associated with arousal and reflexive emotional processing show an effect of negative news and suggest that distrusted sources may even enhance the impact of negative headlines. These findings demonstrate that though we may have distinct perceptions about the credibility of media sources, information processing and social judgments rely on the emotional content of headlines, even when they stem from sources we distrust.
Topics: Adult; Attitude; Brain; Electroencephalography; Emotions; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Mass Media; Reading; Social Behavior; Social Perception; Trust; Young Adult
PubMed: 33274748
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsaa164 -
Cognition Oct 2015Although pain is traditionally assumed to be poorly localized, recent work indicates that spatial acuity for nociception is surprisingly high. Here we investigated...
Although pain is traditionally assumed to be poorly localized, recent work indicates that spatial acuity for nociception is surprisingly high. Here we investigated whether the nervous system can also accurately estimate the distance between two nociceptive stimuli. Estimating distance implies a metric representation of spatial relations, a property that underlies abilities such as perceiving the size of external objects. We presented pairs of simultaneous nociceptive or non-nociceptive somatosensory stimuli, and asked participants to judge the distance between them. Judgments of distance between nociceptive stimuli were much worse than judgments of distance between non-nociceptive tactile stimuli, even on skin regions where spatial acuity for nociception exceeded spatial acuity for touch. Control experiments ruled out explanations based on inaccurate localization of double nociceptive stimuli. Thus, the nervous system poorly represents the distance between two nociceptive stimuli. The dissociation between high spatial acuity and poor distance judgment in the nociceptive system may reflect a specialization for computing accurate spatial representations useful to protect the body, rather than to perceive the size of external objects.
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Pain; Physical Stimulation; Space Perception; Touch; Touch Perception; Young Adult
PubMed: 26113448
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.06.004 -
Consciousness and Cognition Dec 2015A model aimed at explaining prospective duration judgments in real life settings (as well as in the laboratory) is presented. The model is based on the assumption that... (Review)
Review
A model aimed at explaining prospective duration judgments in real life settings (as well as in the laboratory) is presented. The model is based on the assumption that situational meaning is continuously being extracted by humans' perceptual and cognitive information processing systems. Time is one of the important dimensions of situational meaning. Based on the situational meaning, a value for Temporal Relevance is set. Temporal Relevance reflects the importance of temporal aspects for enabling adaptive behavior in a specific moment in time. When Temporal Relevance is above a certain threshold a prospective duration judgment process is evoked automatically. In addition, a search for relevant temporal information is taking place and its outcomes determine the level of Temporal Uncertainty which reflects the degree of knowledge one has regarding temporal aspects of the task to be performed. The levels of Temporal Relevance and Temporal Uncertainty determine the amount of attentional resources allocated for timing by the executive system. The merit of the model is in connecting timing processes with the ongoing general information processing stream. The model rests on findings in various domains which indicate that cognitive-relevance and self-relevance are powerful determinants of resource allocation policy. The feasibility of the model is demonstrated by analyzing various temporal phenomena. Suggestions for further empirical validation of the model are presented.
Topics: Attention; Executive Function; Humans; Judgment; Models, Psychological; Time Perception; Uncertainty
PubMed: 26524983
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.10.006 -
Cognitive Science Jan 2018When attempting to predict future events, people commonly rely on historical data. One psychological characteristic of judgmental forecasting of time series, established...
When attempting to predict future events, people commonly rely on historical data. One psychological characteristic of judgmental forecasting of time series, established by research, is that when people make forecasts from series, they tend to underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones, so-called trend-damping (modeled by anchoring on, and insufficient adjustment from, the average of recent time series values). Events in a time series can be experienced sequentially (dynamic mode), or they can also be retrospectively viewed simultaneously (static mode), not experienced individually in real time. In one experiment, we studied the influence of presentation mode (dynamic and static) on two sorts of judgment: (a) predictions of the next event (forecast) and (b) estimation of the average value of all the events in the presented series (average estimation). Participants' responses in dynamic mode were anchored on more recent events than in static mode for all types of judgment but with different consequences; hence, dynamic presentation improved prediction accuracy, but not estimation. These results are not anticipated by existing theoretical accounts; we develop and present an agent-based model-the adaptive anchoring model (ADAM)-to account for the difference between processing sequences of dynamically and statically presented stimuli (visually presented data). ADAM captures how variation in presentation mode produces variation in responses (and the accuracy of these responses) in both forecasting and judgment tasks. ADAM's model predictions for the forecasting and judgment tasks fit better with the response data than a linear-regression time series model. Moreover, ADAM outperformed autoregressive-integrated-moving-average (ARIMA) and exponential-smoothing models, while neither of these models accounts for people's responses on the average estimation task.
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Models, Statistical; Time Perception
PubMed: 28382639
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12476 -
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology Mar 2022This study examined whether omission bias occurs in moral judgments of lies. Omission bias is the tendency to judge acts of commission as morally worse than equivalent...
This study examined whether omission bias occurs in moral judgments of lies. Omission bias is the tendency to judge acts of commission as morally worse than equivalent acts of omission. Children aged 8 and 9 years (third graders) and 11 and 12 years (sixth graders), as well as adults, made moral judgments about lies of commission and omission to conceal transgressions. Descriptions of four scenarios varied in terms of whether the protagonists lied to benefit themselves or others and whether the transgression was deliberate or accidental. The results showed that both age groups of children, as well as adults, judged that lies of commission were morally worse than lies of omission in all four scenarios, indicating that omission bias clearly occurs in moral judgments of lies. However, there were age differences in the magnitude of omission bias. Third and sixth graders generally showed omission bias of the same magnitude for all scenarios, whereas omission bias in adults was stronger for the scenarios that benefited self rather than others and for scenarios in which deliberate transgressions, rather than accidental ones, were concealed. These results reveal differences in moral judgments of lies between middle childhood and adulthood.
Topics: Adult; Child; Humans; Judgment; Morals
PubMed: 34823045
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105320 -
Experimental Psychology Nov 2017The anchoring bias is a reliable effect wherein a person's judgments are affected by initially presented information, but it is unknown specifically why this effect... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
The anchoring bias is a reliable effect wherein a person's judgments are affected by initially presented information, but it is unknown specifically why this effect occurs. Research examining this bias suggests that elements of both numeric and semantic priming may be involved. To examine this, the present research used a phenomenon wherein people treat numeric information presented differently in Arabic numeral or verbal formats. We presented participants with one of many forms of an anchor that represented the same value (e.g., twelve hundred or 1,200). Thus, we could examine how a concept's meaning and its absolute numeric value affect anchoring. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that people respond to Arabic and verbal anchors differently. Experiment 3 showed that these differences occurred largely because people tend to think of numbers in digit format. This suggests that one's conceptual understanding of the anchored information matters more than its strict numeric value.
Topics: Adult; Decision Making; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Semantics; Young Adult
PubMed: 29268677
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000383