First impressions or good endings? Preferences depend on when you ask.

Rewards often unfold over time; we must summarize events in memory to guide future choices. Do first impressions matter most, or is it better to end on a good note? Across nine studies ( = 569), we tested these competing intuitions and found that preferences depend on when rewards occur and when we are asked to evaluate an experience. In our "garage sale" task, participants opened boxes containing sequences of objects with values.

Memory and belief updating following complete and partial reminders of fake news.

Fake news can have enduring effects on memory and beliefs. An ongoing theoretical debate has investigated whether corrections (fact-checks) should include reminders of fake news. The familiarity backfire account proposes that reminders hinder correction (increasing interference), whereas integration-based accounts argue that reminders facilitate correction (promoting memory integration).

Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.

Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information seeking about COVID-19 exposure risk. In Study 1 (N=221,829), we conducted a large-scale social media field study.

Communicating COVID-19 exposure risk with an interactive website counteracts risk misestimation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals depended on risk information to make decisions about everyday behaviors and public policy. Here, we assessed whether an interactive website influenced individuals' risk tolerance to support public health goals. We collected data from 11,169 unique users who engaged with the online COVID-19 Event Risk Tool (https://covid19risk.

Instructed motivational states bias reinforcement learning and memory formation.

Motivation influences goals, decisions, and memory formation. motivation links urgent goals to actions, narrowing the focus of attention and memory. Conversely, motivation integrates goals over time and space, supporting rich memory encoding for flexible future use.

Reasons for Receiving or Not Receiving Bivalent COVID-19 Booster Vaccinations Among Adults - United States, November 1-December 10, 2022.

Bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines, developed to protect against both ancestral and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 variants, are recommended to increase protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe disease* (1,2).

Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S.

Prediction errors disrupt hippocampal representations and update episodic memories.

The brain supports adaptive behavior by generating predictions, learning from errors, and updating memories to incorporate new information. Prediction error, or surprise, triggers learning when reality contradicts expectations. Prior studies have shown that the hippocampus signals prediction errors, but the hypothesized link to memory updating has not been demonstrated.

Pairing facts with imagined consequences improves pandemic-related risk perception.

The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during a global resurgence more than a year after the crisis began. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to financial stability and mental well-being contributed to this resurgence. In the late stage of the pandemic, it became clear that new interventions were needed to support long-term behavior change.

Closed-minded cognition: Right-wing authoritarianism is negatively related to belief updating following prediction error.

When confronted with information that challenges our beliefs, we must often learn from error in order to successfully navigate the world. Past studies in reinforcement learning and educational psychology have linked prediction error, a measure of surprise, to successful learning from feedback. However, there are substantial individual differences in belief-updating success, and the psychological factors that influence belief updating remain unclear.

Intellectual humility and perceptions of political opponents.

Objective: Intellectual humility (IH) refers to the recognition that personal beliefs might be wrong. We investigate possible interpersonal implications of IH for how people perceive the intellectual capabilities and moral character of their sociopolitical opponents and for their willingness to associate with those opponents.

Method: In four initial studies (N = 1,926, M  = 38, 880 females, 1,035 males), we measured IH, intellectual and moral derogation of opponents, and willingness to befriend opponents.

Prediction Error and Memory Reactivation: How Incomplete Reminders Drive Reconsolidation.

Memories are readily distorted. What conditions allow memories to be altered? Converging evidence implicates prediction error, or surprise, as a key mechanism that renders memories malleable. Recent reconsolidation studies have used incomplete reminders to elicit prediction error; retrieval cues that partially replicate an encoding experience allow memories to be distorted, updated, and strengthened.

Surprise and destabilize: prediction error influences episodic memory reconsolidation.

Through the process of "reconsolidation," reminders can temporarily destabilize memories and render them vulnerable to change. Recent rodent research has proposed that prediction error, or the element of surprise, is a key component of this process; yet, this hypothesis has never before been extended to complex episodic memories in humans. In our novel paradigm, we used naturalistic stimuli to demonstrate that prediction error enables adaptive updating of episodic memories.