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Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Mar 2017Claims about alterations in perception based on manipulations of the energetics hypothesis (and other influences) are often framed as interesting specifically because...
Claims about alterations in perception based on manipulations of the energetics hypothesis (and other influences) are often framed as interesting specifically because they affect our perceptual experience. Many control experiments conducted on such perceptual effects suggest, however, that they are the result of attribution effects and other kinds of judgmental biases influencing the reporting process rather than perception itself. Schnall (2017, this issue), appealing to Heider's work on attribution, argues that it is fruitless to try to distinguish between perception and attribution. This makes the energetics hypothesis less interesting.
Topics: Control Groups; Humans; Judgment; Reading Frames; Social Perception
PubMed: 28346119
DOI: 10.1177/1745691616677829 -
Scientific Reports May 2023The study of moral judgement and decision making examines the way predictions made by moral and ethical theories fare in real world settings. Such investigations are...
The study of moral judgement and decision making examines the way predictions made by moral and ethical theories fare in real world settings. Such investigations are carried out using a variety of approaches and methods, such as experiments, modeling, and observational and field studies, in a variety of populations. The current Collection on moral judgments and decision making includes works that represent this variety, while focusing on some common themes, including group morality and the role of affect in moral judgment. The Collection also includes a significant number of studies that made theoretically driven predictions and failed to find support for them. We highlight the importance of such null-results papers, especially in fields that are traditionally governed by theoretical frameworks.
Topics: Negative Results; Judgment; Morals; Decision Making
PubMed: 37169894
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-34899-x -
Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2024Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition.... (Review)
Review
Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition. While a neuroscience of confidence has focused on the mechanisms underpinning subpersonal phenomena such as representations of uncertainty in the visual or motor system, metacognition research has been concerned with personal-level beliefs and knowledge about self-performance. I provide a road map for bridging this divide by focusing on a particular class of confidence computation: propositional confidence in one's own (hypothetical) decisions or actions. Propositional confidence is informed by the observer's models of the world and their cognitive system, which may be more or less accurate-thus explaining why metacognitive judgments are inferential and sometimes diverge from task performance. Disparate findings on the neural basis of uncertainty and performance monitoring are integrated into a common framework, and a new understanding of the locus of action of metacognitive interventions is developed.
Topics: Humans; Metacognition; Judgment
PubMed: 37722748
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-022423-032425 -
The Journals of Gerontology. Series B,... Jun 2023Recent studies support the idea of an intent-to-outcome shift in moral judgments with age. We further assessed whether a reduced reliance on intentions is associated...
OBJECTIVES
Recent studies support the idea of an intent-to-outcome shift in moral judgments with age. We further assessed whether a reduced reliance on intentions is associated with aging in a preregistered study with 73 younger (20-41 years) and 79 older (70-84 years) adults, group-matched on education level.
METHOD
Participants were presented with a set of moral cases to evaluate, created by varying orthogonally the valence (neutral, negative) of the information regarding the agent's intentions and the action's outcomes.
RESULTS
The two age groups did not differ in the extent they relied on intentions in moral judgment.
DISCUSSION
These results suggest that an intent-to-outcome shift might not be found in all aging populations, challenging prevailing theories suggesting that aging is necessarily associated with a reduced reliance on intentions.
Topics: Humans; Intention; Judgment; Morals
PubMed: 35973063
DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbac114 -
Behavioral Neuroscience Oct 2022Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size...
Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size and perceived duration in human participants performing two temporal bisection tasks in the subsecond and suprasecond interval ranges. In the subsecond task, pupil diameter was greater during stimulus processing when shorter intervals were overestimated but also during and after stimulus offset when longer intervals were underestimated. By contrast, in the suprasecond task, larger pupil diameter was observed only in the late stimulus offset phase prior to response prompts when longer intervals were underestimated. This pattern of results suggests that pupil diameter relates to an error monitoring mechanism in interval timing. These results are at odds with a direct relationship between pupil size and the perception of duration but suggest that pupillometric variation might play a key role in signifying errors related to temporal judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Animals; Humans; Judgment
PubMed: 36222640
DOI: 10.1037/bne0000533 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Sep 2007Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus,... (Review)
Review
Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.
Topics: Affect; Cognition; Decision Making; Humans; Judgment; Thinking
PubMed: 17698405
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.005 -
The International Journal of... Aug 2021Our social activities are quite often erroneous and irrational, based on biased judgements and decision-making, known as social biases. However, the cognitive and...
BACKGROUND
Our social activities are quite often erroneous and irrational, based on biased judgements and decision-making, known as social biases. However, the cognitive and affective processes that produce such biases remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated associations between social schemas, such as social judgment and conformity, entailing social biases and psychological measurements relevant to cognitive and affective functions.
METHOD
This study recruited 42 healthy adult subjects. A psychological test and a questionnaire were administered to assess biased social judgements by superficial attributes and social conformity by adherence to social norms, respectively, along with additional questionnaires and psychological tests for cognitive and affective measurements, including negative affects, autistic traits, and Theory of Mind (ToM). Associations of social judgment and conformity with cognitive and affective functions were examined using a multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling.
RESULTS
Anxiety and the cognitive realm of ToM were mutually associated with both social judgments and conformity, although social judgements and conformity were still independent processes. Social judgements were also associated with autistic traits and the affective realm of ToM, whereas social conformity was associated with negative affects other than anxiety and an intuitive decision-making style.
CONCLUSIONS
These results suggest that ToM and negative affects may play important roles in social judgements and conformity, and the social biases connoted in these social schemas.
Topics: Adult; Affect; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Social Conformity; Social Perception; Theory of Mind; Young Adult
PubMed: 33929492
DOI: 10.1093/ijnp/pyab022 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Oct 2020To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say, "What if everybody did that?" In other words, even if a single person's behavior is harmless, that behavior may be...
To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say, "What if everybody did that?" In other words, even if a single person's behavior is harmless, that behavior may be wrong if it would be harmful once universalized. We formalize the process of universalization in a computational model, test its quantitative predictions in studies of human moral judgment, and distinguish it from alternative models. We show that adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and report comparable patterns of judgment in children. We conclude that, alongside other well-characterized mechanisms of moral judgment, such as outcome-based and rule-based thinking, the logic of universalizing holds an important place in our moral minds.
Topics: Adult; Child; Child, Preschool; Decision Making; Humans; Judgment; Middle Aged; Models, Psychological; Moral Development; Morals; Social Perception
PubMed: 33008885
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2014505117 -
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 -
BMC Medical Ethics Nov 2016Recent rapid technological and medical advance has more than ever before brought to the fore a spectrum of problems broadly categorized under the umbrella of 'ethics of...
Recent rapid technological and medical advance has more than ever before brought to the fore a spectrum of problems broadly categorized under the umbrella of 'ethics of human enhancement'. Some of the most contentious issues are typified well by the arguments put forward in a recent article on human cognitive enhancement authored by Garasic and Lavazza. Herein I analyse some of the assumptions made in their work and highlight important flaws. In particular I address the problems associated with the distinction between 'treatment' and 'enhancement', and 'natural' vs. 'non-natural' therapies.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Technology
PubMed: 27876015
DOI: 10.1186/s12910-016-0155-8