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The Curse of Knowledge in Reasoning About False Beliefs
Susan A.J. Birch1 and Paul Bloom2
1University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and 2Yale University
ABSTRACT—Assessing what other people know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs, that is, beliefs that conflict with reality. The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive-enough measures are used, adults show deficits in a false-belief task similar to one used with young children. In particular, we show a curse-of-knowledge bias in false-belief reasoning. That is, adults’ own knowledge of an event’s outcome can compromise their ability to reason about another person’s beliefs about that event. We also found that adults’ perception of the plausibility of an event mediates the extent of this bias. These findings shed light on the factors involved in false-belief reasoning and are discussed in light of their implications for both adults' and children's social cognition.
Explaining Developmental Reversals in False Memory
C.J. Brainerd and V.F. Reyna
Cornell University
ABSTRACT—We report the first demonstration that a simple, theory-driven manipulation produces opposite developmental trends in false memory for the same information. When 6-, 10-, and 14-year-olds studied lists containing exemplars of familiar taxonomic categories, false memory for the same unpresented items (category exemplars and labels) increased with age if list items were semantically related but decreased with age if semantic relations could not be formed among list items. A control experiment ruled out the hypothesis that these results were due to young children having generic deficits in forming relations among list items.
Central Slowing During the Night
Daniel Bratzke,1 Bettina Rolke,1 Rolf Ulrich,1 and Maren Peters2
1University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, and 2Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
ABSTRACT—The present study determined whether central information processing is subject to a circadian rhythm and, therefore, contributes to the well-known time-of-day effect on reaction time (RT). To assess the duration of central processing chronometrically, we employed the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. In this task, subjects make fast responses to two successive stimuli. RT to the second stimulus is usually prolonged as the interval between the two stimuli decreases. This PRP effect is commonly attributed to a central-processing bottleneck. Subjects performed the PRP task every 2 hr during 28 hr of constant wakefulness under controlled conditions. The PRP effect was most pronounced in the early morning. We conclude that central processing is subject to a circadian rhythm, exhibiting a slowing during the night and a nadir in the early morning.
High Perceptual Load Makes Everybody Equal
Eliminating Individual Differences in Distractibility With Load
Sophie Forster and Nilli Lavie
University College London, London, United Kingdom
ABSTRACT—Perceptual load has been found to be a powerful determinant of distractibility in laboratory tasks. The present study assessed how the effects of perceptual load on distractibility in the laboratory relate to individual differences in the likelihood of distractibility in daily life. Sixty-one subjects performed a response-competition task in which perceptual load was varied. As expected, individuals reporting high levels of distractibility (on the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire, an established measure of distractibility in daily life) experienced greater distractor interference than did individuals reporting low levels. The critical finding, however, was that this relationship was confined to task conditions of low perceptual load: High perceptual load reduced distractor interference for all subjects, eliminating any individual differences. These findings suggest that the level of perceptual load in a task can predict whether individual differences in distractibility will be found and that high-load modifications of daily tasks may prove useful in preventing unwanted consequences of high distractibility.
Putting Feelings Into Words
Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli
Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Tom, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way
University of California, Los Angeles
ABSTRACT—Putting feelings into words (affect labeling) has long been thought to help manage negative emotional experiences; however, the mechanisms by which affect labeling produces this benefit remain largely unknown. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest a possible neurocognitive pathway for this process, but methodological limitations of previous studies have prevented strong inferences from being drawn. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of affect labeling was conducted to remedy these limitations. The results indicated that affect labeling, relative to other forms of encoding, diminished the response of the amygdala and other limbic regions to negative emotional images. Additionally, affect labeling produced increased activity in a single brain region, right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC). Finally, RVLPFC and amygdala activity during affect labeling were inversely correlated, a relationship that was mediated by activity in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). These results suggest that affect labeling may diminish emotional reactivity along a pathway from RVLPFC to MPFC to the amygdala.
Infant Rule Learning Facilitated by Speech
Gary F. Marcus, Keith J. Fernandes, and Scott P. Johnson
New York University
ABSTRACT—Sequences of speech sounds play a central role in human cognitive life, and the principles that govern such sequences are crucial in determining the syntax and semantics of natural languages. Infants are capable of extracting both simple transitional probabilities and simple algebraic rules from sequences of speech, as demonstrated by studies using ABB grammars (la ta ta, gai mu mu, etc.). Here, we report a striking finding: Infants are better able to extract rules from sequences of nonspeech—such as sequences of musical tones, animal sounds, or varying timbres—if they first hear those rules instantiated in sequences of speech
Personality Change Influences Mortality in Older Men
Daniel K. Mroczek1 and Avron Spiro, III2,3
1Department of Child Development and Family Studies, Center on Aging and the Life Course, Purdue University; 2Normative Aging Study, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, MA; and 3Department of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health
ABSTRACT—Previous studies have indicated that high neuroticism is associated with early mortality. However, recent work suggests that people's level of neuroticism changes over long periods of time. We hypothesized that such changes in trait neuroticism affect mortality risk. Growth-curve parameters (levels and slopes) that quantified the trajectories of neuroticism change over 12 years were used to predict 18-year risk of mortality among 1,663 aging men. Proportional hazards models were used to estimate mortality risk from level and slope parameters, controlling for objective and subjective health, depression, and age. Although a parallel analysis of extraversion showed no significant effects, level and slope of neuroticism interacted in their effect on mortality. Men who had both a high average level of neuroticism and an increasing level of neuroticism over time had much lower survival than men without that combination. These findings suggest that it is not just the level of personality traits, but their direction of change, that is related to mortality.
Great Apes' Understanding of Other Individuals' Line of Sight
Sanae Okamoto-Barth,1,2 Josep Call,1 and Michael Tomasello1
1Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and 2Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT—Previous research has shown that many social animals follow the gaze of other individuals. However, knowledge about how this skill differs between species and whether it shows a relationship with genetic distance from humans is still fragmentary. In the present study of gaze following in great apes, we manipulated the nature of a visual obstruction and the presence/absence of a target. We found that bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas followed gaze significantly more often when the obstruction had a window than when it did not, just as human infants do. Additionally, bonobos and chimpanzees looked at the experimenter's side of a windowless obstruction more often than the other species. Moreover, bonobos produced more double looks when the barrier was opaque than when it had a window, indicating an understanding of what other individuals see. The most distant human relatives studied, orangutans, showed few signs of understanding what another individual saw. Instead, they were attracted to the target's location by the target's presence, but not by the experimenter’s gaze. Great apes' perspective-taking skills seem to have increased in the evolutionary lineage leading to bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans.
The Neural Consequences of Semantic Richness
When More Comes to Mind, Less Activation Is Observed
Penny M. Pexman,1 Ian S. Hargreaves,1 Jodi D. Edwards,2 Luke C. Henry,1 and Bradley G. Goodyear2,3,4,5
1Department of Psychology, 2Seaman Family MR Research Centre, 3Department of Radiology, 4Department of Clinical Neurosciences, and 5Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
ABSTRACT—Some concepts have richer semantic representations than others. That is, when considering the meaning of concepts, subjects generate more information (more features, more associates) for some concepts than for others. This variability in semantic richness influences responses in speeded tasks that involve semantic processing, such as lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. It has been suggested that concepts with richer semantic representations build stronger attractors in semantic space, allowing faster settling of activation patterns and thus faster responding. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural activation associated with semantic richness by contrasting activation for words with high and low numbers of associates in a semantic categorization task. Results were consistent with faster semantic settling for words with richer representations: Words with a low number of semantic associates produced more activation than words with a high number of semantic associates in a number of regions, including left inferior frontal and inferior temporal gyri.
The Scars of Memory
A Prospective, Longitudinal Investigation of the Consistency of Traumatic and Positive Emotional Memories in Adulthood
Stephen Porter and Kristine A. Peace
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
ABSTRACT—We conducted a prospective study with individuals who in 2001–2002 described their memories of both a traumatic and a highly positive emotional experience. Of the 49 subjects interviewed after 3 months, 29 were re-interviewed after 3.45 to 5.0 years (M = 3.88). Subjects answered questions from a 12-item consistency questionnaire (maximum possible score of 36), rated the qualities of their memories, and completed questionnaires concerning the impact of the trauma. Results indicated that traumatic memories (including memories for violence) were highly consistent (M = 28.04) over time relative to positive memories (M = 17.75). Ratings of vividness, overall quality, and sensory components declined markedly for positive memories but remained virtually unchanged for traumatic memories. The severity of traumatic symptoms diminished over time and was unrelated to memory consistency. These findings contribute to understanding of the impact of trauma on memory over long periods.
The Art of Conversation Is Coordination
Common Ground and the Coupling of Eye Movements During Dialogue
Daniel C. Richardson,1 Rick Dale,2 and Natasha Z. Kirkham3
1University of California, Santa Cruz; 2Universityof Memphis; and 3Stanford University
ABSTRACT—When two people discuss something they can see in front of them, what is the relationship between their eye movements? We recorded the gaze of pairs of subjects engaged in live, spontaneous dialogue. Cross-recurrence analysis revealed a coupling between the eye movements of the speaker and listener. In the first study, we found their eye movements were coupled across several seconds. In the second, we found that this coupling increased if they both heard the same background information prior to their conversation. These results provide a direct quantification of joint attention during unscripted conversation and show that it is influenced by knowledge in the common ground.
Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later
Cross-Modal Transfer of Talker-Familiarity Effects
Lawrence D. Rosenblum, Rachel M. Miller, and Kauyumari Sanchez
University of California, Riverside
ABSTRACT—There is evidence that for both auditory and visual speech perception, familiarity with the talker facilitates speech recognition. Explanations of these effects have concentrated on the retention of talker information specific to each of these modalities. It could be, however, that some amodal, talker-specific articulatory-style information facilitates speech perception in both modalities. If this is true, then experience with a talker in one modality should facilitate perception of speech from that talker in the other modality. In a test of this prediction, subjects were given about 1 hr of experience lipreading a talker and were then asked to recover speech in noise from either this same talker or a different talker. Results revealed that subjects who lip-read and heard speech from the same talker performed better on the speech-in-noise task than did subjects who lip-read from one talker and then heard speech from a different talker.
The Constructive, Destructive, and Reconstructive Power of Social Norms
P. Wesley Schultz,1 Jessica M. Nolan,2 Robert B. Cialdini,3 Noah J. Goldstein,3 and Vladas Griskevicius3
1California State University, San Marcos; 2University of Arkansas; and 3Arizona State University
ABSTRACT—Despite a long tradition of effectiveness in laboratory tests, normative messages have had mixed success in changing behavior in field contexts, with some studies showing boomerang effects. To test a theoretical account of this inconsistency, we conducted a field experiment in which normative messages were used to promote household energy conservation. As predicted, a descriptive normative message detailing average neighborhood usage produced either desirable energy savings or the undesirable boomerang effect, depending on whether households were already consuming at a low or high rate. Also as predicted, adding an injunctive message (conveying social approval or disapproval) eliminated the boomerang effect. The results offer an explanation for the mixed success of persuasive appeals based on social norms and suggest how such appeals should be properly crafted.
Buying Behavior as a Function of Parametric Variation of Number of Choices
Avni M. Shah and George Wolford
Dartmouth College
ABSTRACT: There is accumulating evidence that having many options from which to choose may be counterproductive (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000; Iyengar, Well, & Schwartz, 2006; Schwartz, 2004). In the consumer world, Procter & Gamble noticed a 10% increase in sales of its Head & Shoulders brand after they reduced the number of varieties (Goldstein, 2001). Iyengar and Lepper (2000) carried out three experiments in which subjects had to choose from a small set of 6 options or from a larger set of 24 or 30 options. Subjects rated the situation with more options as more pleasant than the situation with fewer options, but purchased more when there were fewer options and were more satisfied with their choices.
Most previous research on this topic compared only two set sizes for number of choices: a medium value, such as 6, and a large value, such as 24 (but see Iyengar, Jiang, & Huberman, 2004). We were interested in exploring the influence of number of choices in a more parametric fashion. Several processes might influence buying behavior as the number of choices increases. Presumably, as the number of choices increases, consumers are more likely to find an item that meets their needs. If this is the only process involved, then increasing choice should lead to increased buying. However, as choice increases, consumers are more likely to have two or more items that meet their criteria and are close to one another in subjective value, making the choice difficult. Also, as the number of options increases, the cognitive effort in evaluating those options increases (Keller & Staelin, 1987). We predicted that the interaction of these proposed processes would lead to an inverted-U-shaped function; that is, we predicted that as the number of choices increased, buying would initially increase and then decrease. For the product in our experiment, we chose pens, a commodity that college students are interested in and often purchase. We varied the number of options from 2 to 20 in increments of 2.
Human Brain Activity Time-Locked to Narrative Event Boundaries
Nicole K. Speer, Jeffrey M. Zacks, and Jeremy R. Reynolds
Washington University
ABSTRACT—Readers structure narrative text into a series of events in order to understand and remember the text. In this study, subjects read brief narratives describing everyday activities while brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects later read the stories again to divide them into large and small events. During the initial reading, points later identified as boundaries between events were associated with transient increases in activity in a number of brain regions whose activity was mediated by changes in the narrated situation, such as changes in characters’ goals. These results indicate that the segmentation of narrated activities into events is a spontaneous part of reading, and that this process of segmentation is likely dependent on neural responses to changes in the narrated situation.
Conceptual Combination During Sentence Comprehension
Evidence for Compositional Processes
David Swinney,1 Tracy Love,1,2 Matthew Walenski,1 and Edward E. Smith3
1University of California, San Diego; 2School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University; and 3Columbia University
ABSTRACT—This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept.
Rapid Word Learning Under Uncertainty via Cross-Situational Statistics
Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University
ABSTRACT—There are an infinite number of possible word-to-world pairings in naturalistic learning environments. Previous proposals to solve this mapping problem have focused on linguistic, social, representational, and attentional constraints at a single moment. This article discusses a cross-situational learning strategy based on computing distributional statistics across words, across referents, and, most important, across the co-occurrences of words and referents at multiple moments. We briefly exposed adults to a set of trials that each contained multiple spoken words and multiple pictures of individual objects; no information about word-picture correspondences was given within a trial. Nonetheless, over trials, subjects learned the word-picture mappings through cross-trial statistical relations. Different learning conditions varied the degree of within-trial reference uncertainty, the number of trials, and the length of trials. Overall, the remarkable performance of learners in various learning conditions suggests that they calculate cross-trial statistics with sufficient fidelity and by doing so rapidly learn word-referent pairs even in highly ambiguous learning contexts.
Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. For a copy of an article please contact Catherine West at cwest@psychologicalscience.org.
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Psychological Science