Journal of Experimental Psychology. General

Social attention is reported to be crucial for the development of social skills, and, according to the social cognitive developmental theory, is fostered by social interactions. Autism is of central importance to the study of social attention, as autism is characterized by atypical social interactions and low social attention, both linked according to the social motivation theory to diminished social interest. Much evidence for positing low social interest in autism comes from eye-tracking studies, which, however, lack ecological validity...

Paced breathing-longer exhalation than inhalation-can show short-term improvement of physiologic responses and affective well-being, though most studies have relied on narrow sample demographics, small samples, and control conditions that fail to address expectancy effects. We addressed these limitations through an app-based experiment where participants were randomly assigned to paced breathing or sham control (hand closure) conditions. We first validated the conditions in an online sample ( N = 201; Study 1) and in a lab environment ( N = 72; Study 2)...

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an artificial intelligence system trained on vast amounts of natural language data, enabling it to generate human-like responses to written or spoken language input. Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT)-3.5 is an example of an LLM that supports a conversational agent called ChatGPT. In this work, we used a series of novel prompts to determine whether ChatGPT shows heuristics and other context-sensitive responses. We also tested the same prompts on human participants. Across four studies, we found that ChatGPT was influenced by random anchors in making estimates (anchoring, Study 1); it judged the likelihood of two events occurring together to be higher than the likelihood of either event occurring alone, and it was influenced by anecdotal information (representativeness and availability heuristic, Study 2); it found an item to be more efficacious when its features were presented positively rather than negatively-even though both presentations contained statistically equivalent information (framing effect, Study 3); and it valued an owned item more than a newly found item even though the two items were objectively identical (endowment effect, Study 4)...

Across six preregistered studies ( N = 1,292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific Academic), we investigate how face perception along the dimensions of gender/sex and race can vary based on immediate contextual information as well as personal experience. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that when placing stimuli along a continuum from male to female, cisgender participants sort prototypical gender/sex faces in a bimodal fashion and show less consensus and greater error when placing faces of intermediate gender/sex...

How does race influence the impressions we form through direct interaction? In two preregistered experiments ( N = 239/179), White American participants played a money-sharing game with Black and White players, based on a probabilistic reward reinforcement learning task, in which they chose to interact with players and received feedback on whether a player shared. We found that participants formed stronger reward preferences for White relative to Black players despite equivalent reward feedback between groups-a pattern that was stronger among participants with low internal motivation to respond without prejudice and high explicit prejudice...

While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others' lives. Across five studies ( N = 3,318), we find that people are able to attach socioeconomic inequalities in applicants' backgrounds to their evaluation of the fairness of specific merit-based selection processes and outcomes. Learning that one applicant grew up advantaged-while the other grew up disadvantaged-leads both liberals and conservatives to believe that otherwise identical merit-based procedures and outcomes are significantly less fair...

Our visual systems rapidly perceive and integrate information about object identities and locations. There is long-standing debate about if and how we achieve world-centered (spatiotopic) object representations across eye movements, with many studies reporting persistent retinotopic (eye-centered) effects even for higher level object-location binding. But these studies are generally conducted in fairly static experimental contexts. Might spatiotopic object-location binding only emerge in more dynamic saccade contexts? In the present study, we investigated this using the spatial congruency bias paradigm in healthy adults...

Some stimuli are more memorable than others. Humans have demonstrated partial access to the properties that make a given stimulus more or less memorable. Recently, a deep neural network named ResMem was shown to successfully decode the memorability of visual stimuli as well. However, it remains unknown whether ResMem's predictions of memorability reflect the influence of stimulus-intrinsic properties or other stimulus-extrinsic factors that are known to induce interindividual consistency in memory performance (e...

A distinction has recently been drawn between surface distortions and deep distortions in false memory, where the former are conventional errors of commission and the latter are illogical relations among multiple memories of items. The deep distortions that have been studied to date are violations of the logical rules that govern incompatibility relations, such as additivity and countable additivity. Because that work is confined to laboratory word-list tasks, it is subject to the ecological validity criticism that memory for everyday facts may not exhibit such phenomena...

Numbers are a constant presence in our daily lives: A brain devoid of the ability to process numbers would not be functional in its external environment. Comparing numerical magnitudes is a fundamental ability that requires the processing of numerical distances. From magnitude comparison tasks, a comparison distance effect (DE) emerges: It describes better performance when comparing numerically distant rather than close numbers. Unlike other signatures of number processing, the comparison DE has been assessed only implicitly, with numerical distance as nonsalient task property...

Pronouns often convey information about a person's social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender nonbinary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode (if any) and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns...

A subcortical pathway is thought to have evolved to facilitate fear information transmission, but direct evidence for its existence in humans is lacking. In recent years, rapid, preattentive, and preconscious fear processing has been demonstrated, providing indirect support for the existence of the subcortical pathway by challenging the necessity of canonical cortical pathways in fear processing. However, direct support also requires evidence for the involvement of subcortical regions in fear processing. To address this issue, here we investigate whether fear processing reflects the characteristics of the subcortical structures in the hypothesized subcortical pathway...

Robots' proliferation throughout society offers many opportunities and conveniences. However, our ability to effectively employ these machines relies heavily on our perceptions of their competence. In six studies (N = 2,660), participants played a competitive game with a robot to learn about its capabilities. After the learning experience, we measured explicit and implicit competence impressions to investigate how they reflected the learning experience. We observed two distinct dissociations between people's implicit and explicit competence impressions...

One central question in the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness is regarding the scope of human consciousness. There is a lively debate as to whether high-level information integration is necessarily dependent on consciousness. This study presents a new form of unconscious integration based on the facingness between two individuals. Using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, Experiments 1-3 found that two facing human heads got a privilege in breaking into awareness compared to nonfacing pairs...

The functioning of groups and societies requires that individuals cooperate on public goods such as healthcare and state defense. More often than not, individuals face multiple public goods and must choose on which to cooperate, if at all. Such decisions can be difficult when public goods are attractive on one dimension (e.g., being "efficient" in providing comparatively high returns) and unattractive on another (e.g., creating inequality by providing some group members greater returns than others). We examined how people manage such decision conflicts in five preregistered experiments (N = 900) that confronted participants with two public goods that varied in efficiency and (in)equality of returns...

In six studies, we find evidence of efficiency neglect: when thinking about the effects of population growth, people intuitively focus on increased demand while neglecting the changes in production efficiency that occur alongside, and often in response to, increased demand. In other words, people tend to think of others solely as consumers, rather than as consumers as well as producers. Efficiency neglect leads to beliefs that the real costs of some consumer goods are rising when they are actually decreasing and may contribute to antiimmigration sentiments because of the fear that increasing local population creates competition for fixed resources...

Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts-collectively referred to as the "plain-language movement"-have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n ≈ 225 million words), in which we compared every law passed by congress with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different baseline genres published during approximately the same time period...

The calculation of statistical power has been taken up as a simple yet informative tool to assist in designing an experiment, particularly in justifying sample size. A difficulty with using power for this purpose is that the classical power formula does not incorporate sources of uncertainty (e.g., sampling variability) that can impact the computed power value, leading to a false sense of precision and confidence in design choices. We use simulations to demonstrate the consequences of adding two common sources of uncertainty to the calculation of power...

We often assume that travel direction is redundant with head direction, but from first principles, these two factors provide differing spatial information. Although head direction has been found to be a fundamental component of human navigation, it is unclear how self-motion signals for travel direction contribute to forming a travel trajectory. Employing a novel motion adaptation paradigm from visual neuroscience designed to preclude a contribution of head direction, we found high-level aftereffects of perceived travel direction, indicating that travel direction is a fundamental component of human navigation...

To make sense of the social world, people reason about others' mental states, including whether and in what ways others can form new mental states. We propose that people's judgments concerning the dynamics of mental state change invoke a "naive theory of reasoning." On this theory, people conceptualize reasoning as a rational, semi-autonomous process that individuals can leverage, but not override, to form new rational mental states. Across six experiments, we show that this account of people's naive theory of reasoning predicts judgments about others' ability to form rational and irrational beliefs, desires, and intentions, as well as others' ability to act rationally and irrationally...