Neural-Context Reinstatement of Recurring Events
Adam W. Broitman, Michael J. Kahana
Episodic recollection involves retrieving context information bound to specific events. However, autobiographical memory largely comprises recurrent, similar experiences that become integrated into joint representations. In the current study, we used scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to extract a neural signature of temporal context and investigate whether recalling a recurring event accompanies the reinstatement of one or multiple occurrences. We asked 52 young adults (aged 18–30) from the Philadelphia area to study and recall lists of words that included both once-presented and repeated items. Participants recalled repeated items in association with neighboring list items from each occurrence, but with stronger clustering around the repetition’s initial occurrence. Furthermore, multivariate spectral analyses of EEG data recorded just prior to the recall of these words revealed stronger patterns of context reinstatement of the first occurrence than the second. Together, these results suggest that the initial occurrence of an event carries stronger temporal-context associations than later repetitions, as predicted by retrieved-context frameworks of episodic memory.
The Rise, Impact, and Imbalances of Big-Team Psychology
Nicholas A. Coles, João Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi, Gabrielle L. Grant, Dana M. Basnight-Brown
The present work evaluates the rise, impact, and imbalances of big-team psychology via an analysis of 3,023,895 articles published in the 21st century. Results indicate that big teams—ranging from 10 to more than 100 authors—are relatively unusual (n= 49,695) but increasing in popularity. More notably, such collaborations generate unusually high impact in terms of yearly mentions in scholarly articles (n= 39,788,158), the news (n= 1,018,639), social media (n= 5,971,965), and policy documents (n= 69,959). An examination of country-level sociocultural indicators revealed that first authors, in general, tend to be in regions that are relatively WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. However, this imbalance is slightly more pronounced among larger teams. In summary, results suggest that big-team science is an emerging trend in psychology—one that is unevenly deployed across world regions to generate high-impact scientific insights.
Registered Report: Can Agentic Black Women Get Ahead? An Experiment Revisited
Coco Xinyue Liu, B. Ariel Blair, Elizabeth R. Tenney
In 2012, Livingston et al. found that Black women were buffered against gender backlash; whether Black women were dominant or supportive toward an employee did not affect people’s perceptions of them as leaders in an organization. Conversely, White women incurred a status penalty for being dominant. Twelve years later, no direct replication has been published, and related research reached different conclusions: that Black women experience the most gender backlash for being dominant (as politicians) or that race does not affect gender backlash (for expressing anger). Given the seemingly contradictory results and limitations of previous research, the relationship between race and gender backlash warrants reexamination. In this registered report, we conducted a high-powered direct replication and extension of Livingston et al. with adult participants online (N= 1,996). We found that both Black and White women (as well as men) suffered a status penalty for displaying dominance, suggesting a failure to replicate Livingston et al.’s findings. We discuss implications for theories of intersectional gender backlash.
Individual Differences in Great Ape Cognition Across Time and Domains: Stability, Structure, and Predictability
Manuel Bohn, Christoph J. Völter, Daniel Hanus, et al.
Understanding variation in cognitive abilities is critical to understanding both the evolution and development of cognition. In this study, we examined the stability, structure, and predictability of individual differences in cognitive abilities in great apes across a broad range of domains, including social cognition, reasoning about quantities, executive function, and inferential reasoning. We administered six tasks to 48 individuals from four species, spanning 10 sessions over 1.5 years. Task performance was most strongly predicted by stable, individual-specific characteristics rather than transient or group-level variables. Using additional data from the same individuals in other tasks, we found substantial positive correlations between nonsocial tasks. In contrast, tasks measuring social cognition were not correlated either with each other or with nonsocial measures. Future studies should work toward mechanistic models of great apes’ cognitive processes to build an understanding of the evolution of cognition based on process-level commonalities across species.
Can Italians Understand Spanish? Language Closeness Exacerbates the Illusion of Understanding
Ziyu Ren, Leigh H. Grant, Boaz Keysar
People often understand parts of languages that are closely related to their native tongue. But do they understand what the speaker intends to convey? We discovered that linguistic similarity induces an illusion of understanding, leading people to believe they understand more than they actually do. In Study 1, adult native Italian speakers overestimated their understanding of a speaker’s intent more when they listened to Spanish (close language) than to Northern Jiangsu Chinese (distant language). In Study 2, adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers overestimated their understanding more when they listened to Northern Jiangsu Chinese (close language) than to Spanish (distant language). When listening to the closer language, listeners were more confident, and this mediated their overestimation of understanding. An illusion of understanding, then, increases not despite language closeness but because of it. This has theoretical implications for the role of calibration in communication and practical implications for miscommunication in international settings.
Motive Alignment Promotes Adolescents’ Proenvironmental Behavior: A Field Experiment in Two Cultures
Jenna Spitzer, Stathis Grapsas, Astrid M. G. Poorthuis, Fan Li, Yue Song, Sander Thomaes
Realizing a sustainable future requires the active participation of today’s young generations. How can we foster adolescents’ proenvironmental engagement? In a preregistered, cross-national, longitudinal field experiment, we tested a novel approach to promoting adolescent behavior change: motive alignment. We hypothesized that presenting proenvironmental behavior as aligned with adolescents’ developmentally salient motives (in this case, autonomy and peer status) would enhance their engagement. In Study 1 (the Netherlands), a motive-alignment (versus control) intervention implemented in secondary schools increased adolescents’ proenvironmental food choices on the day of the intervention. Although this effect faded after 4 weeks, participants in the intervention condition continued to donate more to an environmental organization at follow-up. In Study 2 (China), we replicated these findings. Motive alignment thus offers a promising approach to strengthen interventions promoting adolescents’ proenvironmental behavior; it presents scalable and affordable opportunities to foster youth behavior change.
Retributive Sentiments Track Both Deterrent and Compensatory Concerns in a Small-Scale Society and a WEIRD Sample
Léo Fitouchi, Manvir Singh
Evolutionary theories suggest that retributive sentiments evolved to deter antisocial behavior, yet psychological evidence shows punitive sentiments imperfectly optimize deterrence. Recent theories resolve this paradox, suggesting that retributive sentiments serve to restore mutual benefit between partners by both compensating the victim and imposing an additional deterrent cost on the transgressor. In four experiments, we tested predictions of this hypothesis with adults from a small-scale, politically decentralized society (Mentawai horticulturalists, Indonesia;N= 74) and a large-scale society (the United States;N= 600). Consistent with compensatory concerns, participants demanded that victims be rewarded in the currency of their loss and that more severe punishment be imposed when victims suffered more, holding aggressor benefit constant. Consistent with compensation being entangled with deterrence, participants endorsed additional penalties beyond restitution that were higher for recidivism and intentional offenses. This proximate entanglement of compensation and deterrence helps resolve apparent contradictions about the function of punishment in humans.
Multitarget Visual Search Flexibly Switches Between Concurrent and Sequential Search Modes
Alex J. Hoogerbrugge, Christoph Strauch, Noa Hoevers, Christian N. L. Olivers, Tanja C. W. Nijboer, Stefan Van der Stigchel
Investigations into people’s ability to use multiple working memory representations to concurrently search for targets have led to mixed findings. Although the discourse has predominantly centered around capacity limits in multitarget search, we here propose that people can switch between sequential and concurrent search. In Experiment 1 (n= 16 adults), manual responses and oculomotor behavior revealed that participants could search sequentially, and concurrently for at least two targets, when instructed. In Experiments 2a (n= 16 adults) and 2b (n= 16 adults), participants were free to choose how they searched. Trial-level modeling showed that participants primarily used sequential and concurrent search as specific modes and flexibly adjusted between either mode depending on template set size, template availability, stimulus properties, and individual preference. Our findings stress the dynamic and adaptive nature of visual search. Moreover, understanding that different search modes can be flexibly picked as “tools from the toolbox” may reconcile inconsistencies in prior findings.
Not All Practice Is Created Equal: Longitudinal Evidence From Over 40,000 Chess Players
Daniel A. Southwick, Kyle W. Harwell, Garrett Wright, Joseph A. Olsen, Benjamin M. Ogles
In recent years, several scholars have argued that the influence of deliberate practice on expertise has been overstated. Others have contended that these critiques conflate deliberate practice with less effective forms of training. We analyzed a large, longitudinal cohort of Chess.com players (N= 44,213) using objective, time-stamped measures of both practice activity and performance. We tested whether deliberate practice-aligned activities predict greater rating improvement than playing games. Multilevel models revealed that, despite more than 90% of player time being spent on games, deliberate practice was substantially more efficient for learning. Although not all deliberate practice-aligned activities were equally effective, the category as a whole was associated with a 3.61× advantage in learning efficiency relative to gameplay (ps < .001). These findings offer rare real-world evidence in a long-standing theoretical debate about learning efficiency. How individuals train, not just how much, fundamentally shapes the trajectory of skill development.
How Does the Mind Grow? Cross-Cultural Intuitive Theories of Mental Development
Xianwei Meng, Ryuji Oguni, Kuniyuki Nishina, Taro Murakami, Yuka Mizuno, Jinjing (Jenny) Wang
How does the mind grow? Despite centuries of philosophical and psychological inquiry, little is known about how ordinary people intuitively conceptualize mental development. Across six countries (Australia, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States), adult participants reported their intuitions about mental development by indicating when they think various mental capacities first emerge. Across tasks and cultures, intuitions about mental development were consistently organized along two dimensions: an earlier-developing perceptual and experiential dimension (e.g., seeing, fear, hunger, pain) and a later-developing reflective and evaluative dimension (e.g., reasoning, beliefs, self-restraint, pride). Competing models were ruled out, showing that this structure is unique to lay beliefs about mental development. These dimensions also aligned with participants’ intuitions about the origins of mental capacities within a nature–nurture framework. Together, the findings reveal a consistent cross-cultural pattern for reasoning about mental development and illuminate the intuitive architecture of mind perception.
Does Overconfidence Really Confer Adaptive Benefits to Children’s Learning?
Mengqi Hu, Wenbo Zhao, Meiyuan Cao, David R. Shanks, Xiao Hu, Liang Luo, Chunliang Yang
Does overconfidence really confer adaptive benefits to children’s learning? Through a tripartite investigation involving a preregistered replication (Study 1; N = 30, children aged 6–8 years), computational simulation (Study 2), and an experimental intervention (Study 3; N = 64, children aged 6–8 years), we first replicated previous findings that highly overconfident (HO) children exhibited less negative performance change across a memory task than their low-overconfidence (LO) counterparts. However, this pattern was driven by participant-selection bias and regression-to-the-mean effects rather than by adaptive benefits of childhood overconfidence. When experimentally manipulating children’s overconfidence levels to eliminate these methodological drawbacks, the difference in performance changes between HO and LO children disappeared. These findings challenge an influential hypothesis about the adaptive nature of childhood overconfidence, underscore the risks of median-split designs with difference scores, highlight the necessity of causal experimental approaches in developmental research, and raise concerns about educational practices promoting positive illusions in children.
Does Testosterone Affect Cognitive Reflection? Evidence From a Double-Blind, Randomized Controlled Study of 1,000 Participants
Erik L. Knight, Gideon Nave, Steven D. Shaw, Coren Apicella, Pierre L. Bonin, Anna Dreber, Shawn N. Geniole, et al.
The cognitive reflection test (CRT) measures reliance on intuitive thinking versus deliberate reasoning and predicts important real-world outcomes. Prior research has suggested that testosterone administration impaired CRT performance, but follow-up studies produced null results. To provide a rigorous test, we conducted a large, preregistered, double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment, unprecedented in size, with 1,000 adult men, as part of an adversarial collaboration. Participants received a single dose of intranasal testosterone or placebo, completed the CRT, and rated their confidence level. We found an insignificant treatment effect on the CRT, with the point estimate in the opposite direction of the original hypothesis (β LOGIT = 0.118, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [−0.099, 0.335]). In a second primary test, we found a significant negative treatment effect on confidence (β LOGIT = −0.329, 95% CI = [−0.558, −0.100]), which is also the opposite of our prediction. Our findings challenge earlier claims about testosterone’s cognitive effects and highlight the importance of high-powered replications. Long-term or developmental testosterone effects remain potentially important but difficult to study.
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