The number of possible approaches to conducting and analyzing a research study—often referred to as researcher degrees of freedom—has been increasingly under scrutiny as a challenge to the reproducibility of experimental results. Here we focus on the specific instance of time window selection for time series data. As an example, we use data from a visual world eye tracking paradigm in which participants heard a word and were instructed to click on one of four pictures corresponding to the target (e.g., “Click on the hat”). We examined statistical models for a range of start times following the beginning of the carrier phrase, and for each start time a range of window lengths, resulting in 8281 unique time windows. For each time window we ran the same logistic linear mixed effects model, including effects of time, age, noise, and word frequency on an orthogonalized polynomial basis set. Comparing results across these time ranges shows substantial changes in both parameter estimates and p values, even within intuitively “reasonable” boundaries. In some cases varying the window selection in the range of 100–200 ms caused parameter estimates to change from positive to negative. Rather than rush to provide specific recommendations for time window selection (which differs across studies), we advocate for transparency regarding time window selection and awareness of the effects this choice may have on results. Preregistration and multiverse model exploration are two complementary strategies to help mitigate bias introduced by any particular time window choice.

Language users encounter words in at least two different modalities. Arguably, the most frequent encounters are in spoken or written form. Previous research has shown that – compared to the spoken modality – written language features more difficult words. An important question is whether input modality has effects on word recognition accuracy. In the present study, we investigated whether input modality (spoken, written, or bimodal) affected word recognition accuracy and whether such a modality effect interacted with word difficulty. Moreover, we tested whether the participants’ reading experience interacted with word difficulty and whether this interaction was influenced by modality. We re-analyzed data from 48 Dutch university students that were collected in the context of a vocabulary test development to assess in which modality test words should be presented. Participants carried out a word recognition task, where non-words and words of varying difficulty were presented in auditory, visual and audio-visual modalities. In addition, they completed a receptive vocabulary and an author recognition test to measure their exposure to literary texts. Our re-analyses showed that word difficulty interacted with reading experience in that frequent readers (i.e., with more exposure to written texts) were more accurate in recognizing difficult words than individuals who read less frequently. However, there was no evidence for an effect of input modality on word recognition accuracy, nor for interactions with word difficulty or reading experience. Thus, in our study, input modality did not influence word recognition accuracy. We discuss the implications of this finding and describe possibilities for future research involving other groups of participants and/or different languages.

At its best, strategic thinking yields an advantage needed to beat an opponent. At the least, it protects the person from exploitation. In four studies, conducted in two countries, we used a simple number-guessing game, in which one respondent wins by guessing the number chosen by another. We show that people generate numbers nonrandomly, and, on the basis of this finding, we predict and find that nonrandom strategic choice is advantageous to the guesser if the chooser does not randomize either. As expected, respondents in the role of the guesser preferred to play a game in which they were to actively think of a number instead of randomizing if the chooser had to think of a number, too. Guessers did not prefer thinking if the chooser selected a number randomly. Having shown these limitations to strategic reasoning, we close with the observation that successful strategic reasoning may – at times – require the breaking of rules and being the first to do so.

Event boundaries are important moments throughout an ongoing activity that influence perception and memory. They allow people to parse continuous activities into meaningful events, encode the temporal sequence of events and bind event information together in episodic memory (DuBrow & Davachi, 2013). Thus, drawing attention to event boundaries may facilitate these important perceptual and encoding processes. In the current study, we used emotionally arousing stimuli to guide attention to event boundaries because this type of stimulus has been shown to influence perception and attention. We evaluated whether accentuating event boundaries with commercials improves memory and whether emotional stimuli further enhance this effect. A total of 97 participants watched a television episode in which we manipulated commercial break locations (boundary, non-boundary, no commercial) and the type of commercial (emotional, neutral) and then completed memory tasks. Overall, placing emotionally arousing commercials at event boundaries increased memory for the temporal order of events, but no other effects of accentuating event boundaries were observed. Thus, drawing attention to event boundaries—via emotionally charged commercials—increases the likelihood that people will perceive the change in events, update their mental model accordingly and better integrate temporal information from the just-encoded event.

In recent years, understanding psychological constructs as network processes has gained considerable traction in the social sciences. In this paper, we propose the aesthetic effects network (AEN) as a novel way to conceptualize aesthetic experience. The AEN represents an associative process where having one association leads to the next association, generating an overall aesthetic experience. In art theory, associations of this kind are referred to as aesthetic effects . The AEN provides an explicit account of a specific cognitive process involved in aesthetic experience. We first outline the AEN and discuss empirical results (Study 1, N =255) to explore what can be gained from this approach. Second, in Study 2 ( N =133, pre-registered) we follow calls in the literature to substantiate network theories by using an experimental manipulation, and found evidence in favor of the AEN over other alternatives. The AEN provides a basis for future studies that can apply a network perspective to different aesthetic experiences and processes. This perspective takes a process-based approach to aesthetic experience, where aesthetic experience is represented as an active interaction between viewer and artwork. If we want to understand how people experience art, it is central to know why people have different experiences with the same artworks, and, also, why people have similar experiences when looking at different artworks. Our proposed network perspective offers a new way to approach and potentially answer these questions.

The circadian rhythm regulates arousal and activity levels throughout the day and determines hours of optimal cognitive performance. Thus far, circadian fluctuations in face recognition performance received little attention in the research literature. The current experiment investigated the effects of time-of-day optimality on the ability to recognize faces and discriminate between the contexts in which where they were encountered. Morning- and evening-type participants ( N = 91) encoded faces in a crime-related and a neutral context, either at their optimal or non-optimal time of day. Contrary to our hypotheses, neither face recognition nor source monitoring performance benefited from testing at optimal time of day. We discuss peculiarities of face processing that could account for the discrepancy of our findings with word recall and recognition literature.

Adults’ reports of earliest autobiographical memories from before the age of 3 are typically scarce. However, recent research suggests that the age range of this childhood amnesia is flexible when participant instructions provide a context in which earlier or later ages of childhood events are plausible (Kingo et al., 2013). This age manipulation may be more or less effective depending on the type of memories, i.e., event memories that describe a specific event, or fragments / snapshots that describe elements of a past event. One earlier study showed that after reading an early age example, the age in event memories was younger than after a late age example, whereas this difference was less pronounced in snapshot memories (Wessel et al., 2019). The present aim was to examine the malleability of the age in earliest childhood memories and replicate this age manipulation by memory type interaction as well as the overall effects of the age manipulation demonstrated earlier (Wessel et al., 2019). Three studies varied the age in example event memories and fragments (early, late, or no age). Overall, the results suggested that age information affects the reported age, but not necessarily more for event memories than for fragments. That is, all present studies failed to replicate the age manipulation by memory type interaction reflecting that relative to the early condition, event memories in the late condition were older than snapshot memories (Wessel et al., 2019). Even though we cannot conclude that a true effect does not exist, the original finding may be taken as reflecting a false positive.

In interval timing experiments, motor reproduction is the predominant method used when participants are asked to estimate an interval. However, it is unknown how its accuracy, precision and efficiency compare to alternative methods, such as indicating the duration by spatial estimation on a timeline. In two experiments, we compared different interval estimation methods. In the first experiment, participants were asked to reproduce an interval by means of motor reproduction, timeline estimation, or verbal estimation. We found that, on average, verbal estimates were more accurate and precise than line estimates and motor reproductions. However, we found a bias towards familiar whole second units when giving verbal estimates. Motor reproductions were more precise, but not more accurate than timeline estimates. In the second experiment, we used a more complex task: Participants were presented a stream of digits and one target letter and were subsequently asked to reproduce both the interval to target onset and the duration of the total stream by means of motor reproduction and timeline estimation. We found that motor reproductions were more accurate, but not more precise than timeline estimates. In both experiments, timeline estimates had the lowest reaction times. Overall, our results suggest that the transformation of time into space has only a relatively minor cost. In addition, they show that each estimation method comes with its own advantages, and that the choice of estimation method depends on choices in the experimental design: for example, when using durations with integer durations verbal estimates are superior, yet when testing long durations, motor reproductions are time intensive making timeline estimates a more sensible choice.

Both humans and some non-human animals tend to respond more vigorously after failing to obtain rewards. Such response invigoration becomes more pronounced when individuals have increased expectations of obtaining rewards during reward pursuit (expectancy), and when they perceive the eventual loss to be proximal to reward receipt (proximity). However, it was unclear whether proximity and expectancy may have distinct influences on response vigor. To investigate this question, we developed a computerized ’scratch card’ task, in which participants turned three cards one by one and won points when all three cards matched (AAA). After each game, they pressed keys to confirm the outcome and start a new game. We included three types of losses: AAB, where participants had increased expectancy of winning as the game evolved, and the final outcome was proximal to winning; ABB and ABA, with reduced expectancy, but high proximity to winning; and ABC, with reduced expectancy and low proximity to winning. In three online studies, we consistently observed that participants confirmed losses more quickly than wins. Importantly, detailed analyses of the different types of losses revealed that proximity reduced vigor, whereas expectancy increased it. Together, these findings are in line with general appraisal theories: the adjustments of response vigor may be triggered by the appraised discrepancy between the current state and a reference state (e.g., attaining one’s goal), and serve to close the gap and facilitate goal pursuit. These findings may also have implications for the effect of ‘near miss’ on gambling persistence. Further exploring how reward omission impacts response vigor may help us better understand the goal pursuit process, and how it becomes maladaptive under certain circumstances.

This study assessed the effects of age, word frequency, and background noise on the time course of lexical activation during spoken word recognition. Participants (41 young adults and 39 older adults) performed a visual world word recognition task while we monitored their gaze position. On each trial, four phonologically unrelated pictures appeared on the screen. A target word was presented auditorily following a carrier phrase (“Click on ________”), at which point participants were instructed to use the mouse to click on the picture that corresponded to the target word. High- and low-frequency words were presented in quiet to half of the participants. The other half heard the words in a low level of noise in which the words were still readily identifiable. Results showed that, even in the absence of phonological competitors in the visual array, high-frequency words were fixated more quickly than low-frequency words by both listener groups. Young adults were generally faster to fixate on targets compared to older adults, but the pattern of interactions among noise, word frequency, and listener age showed that older adults’ lexical activation largely matches that of young adults in a modest amount of noise.

Emotion Induced Blindness (EIB) is characterized by an impairment in the detection of a neutral target image when it appears between 100-500ms after the presentation of an emotional image. EIB has been argued to be an early level perceptual impairment resulting from spatio-temporal competition between the neutral target and the emotional distractor. While the role of attentional processes is implied in EIB, there hasn’t been a systematic comparison between EIB and Attentional Blink (AB) concerning the locus of attentional control. That is, in most of the AB studies, participants are required to identify and report T1 while in EIB studies they are asked to ignore the emotional distractor. Hence, the differences between AB and EIB may stem from this difference in attentional control. In Expt. 1 and Expt. 2 participants were asked to report two targets in an RSVP stream and we found similar impairment in both the experiments, irrespective of the emotional nature of the target. However, in Expt. 3 and 4 where participants were required to report only one target, only the emotional distractor captured attention, leading to an impairment in target detection. Our result shows that target impairment in EIB is due to the exogenous attentional allocation to the emotional image. i.e., distractor image being emotionally salient captures attention in a bottom-up manner leading to the impairment in the less salient target.

Media headlines reporting scientific research frequently include generic phrases such as “Scientists believe x” or “Experts think y”. These phrases capture attention and succinctly communicate science to the public. However, by generically attributing beliefs to ‘Scientists’, ‘Experts’ or ‘Researchers’ the degree of scientific consensus must be inferred by the reader or listener (do all scientists believe x , most scientists, or just a few?). Our data revealed that decontextualized generic phrases such as “Scientists say…” imply consensus among a majority of relevant experts (53.8% in Study 1 and 60.7-61.8% in Study 2). There was little variation in the degree of consensus implied by different generic phrases, but wide variation between different participants. These ratings of decontextualized phrases will inevitably be labile and prone to change with the addition of context, but under controlled conditions people interpret generic consensus statements in very different ways. We tested the novel hypothesis that individual differences in consensus estimates occur because generic phrases encourage an intuitive overgeneralization (e.g., Scientists believe = All scientists believe ) that some people revise downwards on reflection (e.g., Scientists believe = Some scientists believe ). Two pre-registered studies failed to support this hypothesis. There was no significant relationship between reflective thinking and consensus estimates (Study 1) and enforced reflection did not cause estimates to be revised downwards (Study 2). Those reporting scientific research should be aware that generically attributing beliefs to ‘Scientists’ or ‘Researchers’ is ambiguous and inappropriate when there is no clear consensus among relevant experts.

Reports of experiences of ownership over a fake hand following simple multisensory stimulation (the ‘rubber hand illusion’) have generated an expansive literature. Because such reports might reflect suggestion effects, demand characteristics are routinely controlled for by contrasting agreement ratings for ‘illusion’ and ‘control’ conditions. However, these methods have never been validated, and recent evidence that response to imaginative suggestion (‘phenomenological control’) predicts illusion report prompts reconsideration of their efficacy. A crucial assumption of the standard approach is that demand characteristics are matched across conditions. Here, a quasi-experiment design was employed to test demand characteristics in rubber hand illusion reports. Participants were provided with information about the rubber hand illusion procedure (text description and video demonstration) and recorded expectancies for standard ‘illusion’ and ‘control’ statements. Expectancies for ‘control’ and ‘illusion’ statements in synchronous and asynchronous conditions were found to differ similarly to published illusion reports. Therefore, rubber hand illusion control methods which have been in use for 22 years are not fit for purpose. Because demand characteristics have not been controlled in illusion report in existing studies, the illusion may be, partially or entirely, a suggestion effect. Methods to develop robust controls are proposed. That confounding demand characteristics have been overlooked for decades may be attributable to a lack of awareness that demand characteristics can drive experience in psychological science.

We explore the development of habitual responding within the colour-word contingency learning paradigm, in which participants respond to the colour of neutral words. Each word is most often presented in one colour. Learning is indicated by faster responses to the colour when the word is presented in the expected rather than in the unexpected colour. In Experiment 1, participants took part in two sessions, separated by one day. Critically, one set of words was trained across both days, and other new sets of words were introduced at various time points. Overall performance was faster on trials with overtrained words. Additionally, contingency effects were larger for overtrained words than for words introduced on Day 2. Removing the contingency had a similar impact on the learning effect for overtrained and new words. However, during a counterconditioning phase, where the words were made predictive of new colours, the previous contingency continued to influence performance for overtrained words but not for more recently introduced words. Relatedly, the new contingency was not acquired for the overtrained words. The reverse pattern was observed for recently-introduced words, with the newly-introduced contingency rapidly acquired and the influence of the old contingency quickly extinguished. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, both new and old learning effects were observed for both overtrained and recently-acquired contingencies. The net results suggest that while contingency learning effects are highly pliable during initial and subsequent learning, early-acquired contingency knowledge is maintained after removal of the contingency. Implications for models of learning are discussed.

The survival processing effect describes the phenomenon that memory for items is better after they have been processed in the context of a fitness-related survival scenario as compared to alternative processing contexts. In the present study, we examined whether the survival processing memory advantage translates to memory for the order of processed items. Across two serial-recall experiments, we replicated the survival processing effect for free recall but did not find an additional survival processing advantage for serial recall when we controlled serial recall performance for the total number of words recalled per person. Adjusted serial recall performance was not better in the survival processing condition when compared to a moving and a relational pleasantness processing condition (Experiment 1), even when processing of the relational order of stimuli was explicitly endorsed in the survival processing task (Experiment 2). This finding is in line with the idea that enhanced item-specific rather than enhanced relational processing of items underlies the survival processing effect. Moreover, our findings indicate that survival processing does not increase memory efficiency for temporal context information.

Colors convey meaning and can impair intellectual performance in achievement situations. Even the processing of color words can exert similar detrimental effects. In four experiments, we tried to replicate previous findings regarding the processing of the word “red” (as compared to a control color) on cognitive test scores. Experiments 1 and 2 ( N s = 69 and 104) are direct replications of Lichtenfeld, Maier, Elliot, and Pekrun ( 2009 ). Both experiments failed to uncover a red color effect on verbal reasoning scores among high school students and undergraduates (Cohen’s d = 0.04 and –0.23). Experiments 3 and 4 ( N = 103 and 1,149) failed to identify an effect of processing red on general knowledge test scores (Cohen’s d = 0.19) and 0.01) among undergraduates and adults. Together, these results do not corroborate the assumption that processing the word red impairs intellectual performance.

The neural basis of time perception remains unknown. A prominent account is the pacemaker-accumulator model, wherein regular ticks of some physiological or neural pacemaker are read out as time. Putative candidates for the pacemaker have been suggested in physiological processes (heartbeat), or dopaminergic mid-brain neurons, whose activity has been associated with spontaneous blinking. However, such proposals have difficulty accounting for observations that time perception varies systematically with perceptual content. We examined physiological influences on human duration estimates for naturalistic videos between 1–64 seconds using cardiac and eye recordings. Duration estimates were biased by the amount of change in scene content. Contrary to previous claims, heart rate, and blinking were not related to duration estimates. Our results support a recent proposal that tracking change in perceptual classification networks provides a basis for human time perception, and suggest that previous assertions of the importance of physiological factors should be tempered.

Recent advances in machine learning, combined with the increased availability of large natural language datasets, have made it possible to uncover semantic representations that characterize what people know about and associate with a wide range of objects and concepts. In this paper, we examine the power of word embeddings, a popular approach for uncovering semantic representations, for studying high-level human judgment. Word embeddings are typically applied to linguistic and semantic tasks, however we show that word embeddings can be used to predict complex theoretically- and practically- relevant human perceptions and evaluations in domains as diverse as social cognition, health behavior, risk perception, organizational behavior, and marketing. By learning mappings from word embeddings directly onto judgment ratings, we outperform a similarity-based baseline and perform favorably compared to common metrics of human inter-rater reliability. Word embeddings are also able to identify the concepts that are most associated with observed perceptions and evaluations, and can thus shed light on the psychological substrates of judgment. Overall, we provide new methods and insights for predicting and understanding high-level human judgment, with important applications across the social and behavioral sciences.

Older adults typically remember more positive than negative information compared to their younger counterparts; a phenomenon referred to as the ‘positivity effect.’ According to the socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), the positivity effect derives from the age-related motivational shift towards attaining emotionally meaningful goals which become more important as the perception of future time becomes more limited. Cognitive control mechanisms are critical in achieving such goals and therefore SST predicts that the positivity effect is associated with preserved cognitive control mechanisms in older adults. In contrast, the aging-brain model suggests that the positivity effect is driven by an age-related decline in the amygdala which is responsible for emotional processing and emotional learning. The aim of the current research was to address whether the age-related positivity effect is associated with cognitive control or impaired emotional processing associated with aging. We included older old adults, younger old adults and younger adults and tested their memory for emotional stimuli, cognitive control and amygdala-dependent fear conditioned responses. Consistent with prior research, older adults, relative to younger adults, demonstrate better memory for positive over negative images. We further found that within a group of older adults, the positivity effect increases as a function of age, such that older old adults demonstrated a greater positivity effect compared to younger older adults. Furthermore, the positivity effect in older old adults was associated with preserved cognitive control, supporting the prediction of SST. Contrary to the prediction of the aging-brain model, participants across all groups demonstrated similar enhanced skin conductance responses to fear conditioned stimuli – responses known to rely on the amygdala. Our results support SST and suggest that the positivity effect in older adults is achieved by the preserved cognitive control mechanisms and is not a reflection of the impaired emotional function associated with age.

In this paper, we draw connections between reward processing and cognition by behaviourally testing the implications of neurobiological theories of reward processing on memory. Single-cell neurophysiology in non-human primates and imaging work in humans suggests that the dopaminergic reward system responds to different components of reward: expected value; outcome or prediction error; and uncertainty of reward ( Schultz et al., 2008 ). The literature on both incidental and motivated learning has focused on understanding how expected value and outcome—linked to increased activity in the reward system—lead to consolidation-related memory enhancements. In the current study, we additionally investigate the impact of reward uncertainty on human memory. The contribution of reward uncertainty—the spread of the reward probability distribution irrespective of the magnitude—has not been previously examined. To examine the effects of uncertainty on memory, a word-learning task was introduced, along with a surprise delayed recognition memory test. Using Bayesian model selection, we found evidence only for expected value as a predictor of memory performance. Our findings suggest that reward uncertainty does not enhance memory for individual items. This supports emerging evidence that an effect of uncertainty on memory is only observed in high compared to low risk environments.