Psychological Science

Education has been claimed to reduce aging-associated declines in cognitive function. Given its societal relevance, considerable resources have been devoted to this research. However, because of the difficulty of detecting modest rates of change, findings have been mixed. These discrepancies may stem from methodological shortcomings such as short time spans, few waves, and small samples. The present study overcame these limitations ( N = 1,892, nine waves over a period of 20 years). We tested the effect of education level on baseline performance (intercept) and the rate of change (slope) in crystallized and fluid cognitive abilities ( gc and gf , respectively) in a sample of Japanese adults...

We investigated a novel cognitive-ecological account for misbeliefs about the relationship between food healthiness and tastiness. We propose that different frequencies of healthy and tasty foods in contrasting contexts can trigger perceptions that health and taste are related in ways that diverge from the actual health-taste correlation in the presented food. To investigate this proposal, we conducted three studies (total N = 369), including a taste test, with adult Prolific academic participants from the United Kingdom and undergraduate psychology students from Austria...

The current study investigated how stress affects value-based decision-making during spatial navigation and different types of learning underlying decisions. Eighty-two adult participants (42 females) first learned to find object locations in a virtual environment from a fixed starting location (rigid learning) and then to find the same objects from unpredictable starting locations (flexible learning). Participants then decided whether to reach goal objects from the fixed or unpredictable starting location...

Research has recently shown that efficient selection relies on the implicit extraction of environmental regularities, known as statistical learning . Although this has been demonstrated for scenes, similar learning arguably also occurs for objects. To test this, we developed a paradigm that allowed us to track attentional priority at specific object locations irrespective of the object's orientation in three experiments with young adults (all N s = 80). Experiments 1a and 1b established within-object statistical learning by demonstrating increased attentional priority at relevant object parts (e...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Categorization has a deep impact on behavior, but whether category learning is served by a single system or multiple systems remains debated. Here, we designed two well-equated nonspeech auditory category learning challenges to draw on putative procedural (information-integration) versus declarative (rule-based) learning systems among adult Hebrew-speaking control participants and individuals with dyslexia, a language disorder that has been linked to a selective disruption in the procedural memory system and in which phonological deficits are ubiquitous...

When meeting other people for the first time, how should one behave in order to be liked? We investigated the effects of agentic and communal behaviors on two forms of being liked: popularity (being generally liked by others) and unique liking (being uniquely liked by specific interaction partners). In a round-robin study, 139 unacquainted German adults had dyadic conversations and provided liking ratings afterward. The conversations were recorded on video, and four agentic behaviors (leading, dominant, confident, boastful) and four communal behaviors (polite, benevolent, warm, friendly) were each rated by trained observers...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Rooted in the novel and the mysterious, awe is a common experience in childhood, but research is almost silent with respect to the import of this emotion for children. Awe makes individuals feel small, thereby shifting their attention to the social world. Here, we studied the effects of art-elicited awe on children's prosocial behavior toward an out-group and its unique physiological correlates. In two preregistered studies (Study 1: N = 159, Study 2: N = 353), children between 8 and 13 years old viewed movie clips that elicited awe, joy, or a neutral (control) response...

U.S. police departments have attempted to address racial inequities in policing with diversity training. However, little research has evaluated whether these trainings are effective at changing officers' beliefs, motivations, and actions. To examine their efficacy, we tested a day-long implicit-bias-oriented diversity training designed to increase U.S. police officers' knowledge of biases, concerns about bias, and use of evidence-based strategies to mitigate bias (total N = 3,764). The training was immediately effective at increasing knowledge about bias, concerns about bias, and intentions to address bias, relative to baseline...

Does sex/gender matter for language acquisition? Small advantages in vocabulary size for females are well documented. In this study, however, we found that children's early vocabulary composition was a significantly better predictor of sex/gender than their vocabulary size. We conducted classification analysis on word-production data from children (12-36 months old, n = 39,553) acquiring 26 different languages. Children's sex/gender was classified at above-chance levels in 22 of 26 languages. Classification accuracy was significantly higher than for models based on vocabulary size and increased as a function of sample size...

In April 2019, Psychological Science published its first issue in which all Research Articles received the Open Data badge. We used that issue to investigate the effectiveness of this badge, focusing on the adherence to its aim at Psychological Science : sharing both data and code to ensure reproducibility of results. Twelve researchers of varying experience levels attempted to reproduce the results of the empirical articles in the target issue (at least three researchers per article). We found that all 14 articles provided at least some data and six provided analysis code, but only one article was rated to be exactly reproducible, and three were rated as essentially reproducible with minor deviations...

Adaptive behavior requires learning about the structure of one's environment to derive optimal action policies, and previous studies have documented transfer of such structural knowledge to bias choices in new environments. Here, we asked whether people could also acquire and transfer more abstract knowledge across different task environments, specifically expectations about cognitive control demands. Over three experiments, participants (Amazon Mechanical Turk workers; N = ~80 adults per group) performed a probabilistic card-sorting task in environments of either a low or high volatility of task rule changes (requiring low or high cognitive flexibility, respectively) before transitioning to a medium-volatility environment...

It is widely recognized that psychological stress impairs performance for elite athletes, yet direct evidence is scarce when it comes to high-stakes competition because measuring real-time psychological stress without interference is often challenging. Contactless real-time heart rate-a technology-enabled biomarker of stress-was measured and broadcast on TV during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics archery competition for the first time in sports. Here we examined whether the real-time heart rate of 122 adult archers predicted their performance in this unique setting...

Boundary extension is a classic memory illusion in which observers remember more of a scene than was presented. According to predictive-processing accounts, boundary extension reflects the integration of visual input and expectations of what is beyond a scene's boundaries. According to normalization accounts, boundary extension rather reflects one end of a normalization process toward a scene's typically experienced viewing distance, such that close-up views give boundary extension but distant views give boundary contraction...

Languages carve up conceptual space in varying ways-for example, English uses the verb cut both for cutting with a knife and for cutting with scissors, but other languages use distinct verbs for these events. We asked whether, despite this variability, there are universal constraints on how languages categorize events involving tools (e.g., knife-cutting). We analyzed descriptions of tool events from two groups: (a) 43 hearing adult speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese and (b) 10 deaf child homesigners ages 3 to 11 (each of whom has created a gestural language without input from a conventional language model) in five different countries (Guatemala, Nicaragua, United States, Taiwan, Turkey)...

Visual short-term memory (STM) is a foundational component of general cognition that develops rapidly during the first year of life. Although previous research has revealed important relations between overt visual fixation and memory formation, it is unknown whether infants can maintain distinct memories for sequentially fixated items or remember nonfixated array items. Participants (5-month-olds, 11-month-olds, and adults; n = 24 at each age) from the United States were tested in a passive change-detection paradigm with an n -back manipulation to examine memory for the last fixated item (one-back), second-to-last fixated item (two-back), or nonfixated item (change-other)...

Spatial cognition is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, but our understanding of its developmental trajectory across the life span is limited. Here, we applied game-based assessment on mobile devices to engage a large sample from China ( N = 216,713) with a wide age range (from under 10 years old to above 60) in multiple participations of a mental rotation task, a typical measure of spatial cognition. We found that spatial ability developed asynchronously with its malleability. Whereas mental rotation performance peaked at the age of 28, with males performing better than females, the effect of training from repeated participation peaked at 18, probably laying the foundation for the development of spatial ability...

When recalling memories, we often scan information-rich continuous episodes, for example, to find our keys. How does our brain access and search through those memories? We suggest that high-level structure, marked by event boundaries, guides us through this process: In our computational model, memory scanning is sped up by skipping ahead to the next event boundary upon reaching a decision threshold. In adult Mechanical Turk workers from the United States, we used a movie (normed for event boundaries; Study 1, N = 203) to prompt memory scanning of movie segments for answers (Study 2, N = 298) and mental simulation (Study 3, N = 100) of these segments...

Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and well-being. Systematic variations in risk-taking behavior can be the result of differences in fitness expectations, as predicted by life-history theory. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk-taking behavior remain poorly understood. Here, we studied risk preferences of chimpanzees (86 Pan troglodytes ; 47 females; age = 2-40 years) using a multimethod approach that combined observer ratings with behavioral choice experiments...