Social distancing between personal belongings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to instructions and suggestions from governments and experts to maintain social (physical) distance between people to prevent aerosol transmission of the virus, which is now becoming the norm. Thus, we examined whether the pandemic extended the distance between personal belongings.

Methods: We recruited 68 university students and instructed them to place their belongings on a long table following another participant (i.

Romantic bias in judging the attractiveness of faces wearing masks.

The spread of COVID-19 has drastically increased the number of people wearing masks in public areas and the opportunities to evaluate others' faces based on limited information. This study investigates the cognitive bias in judging the attractiveness of faces partially hidden by sanitary masks. Experiment 1 revealed that men rated women's faces as more attractive when wearing masks, specifically in the context of rating women as romantic partners; however, this mask bias was absent when men rated women as friends.

Correction to: 'Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: The Transparent Psi Project' (2023) by Kekecs .

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.191375.

Backward illusory line motion: Visual motion perception can be influenced by retrospective stimulation.

When a visual cue appears beside a horizontal line segment before the line appears, the illusory motion is perceived as a line extending from the side closest to the side farthest from the cue. This is known as illusory line motion (ILM). In Experiment 1, we presented the cue after the line onset and found that the line seemed to extend toward the side of the cue (backward ILM).

Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project.

The low reproducibility rate in social sciences has produced hesitation among researchers in accepting published findings at their face value. Despite the advent of initiatives to increase transparency in research reporting, the field is still lacking tools to verify the credibility of research reports. In the present paper, we describe methodologies that let researchers craft highly credible research and allow their peers to verify this credibility.

Language-Based Modulation of the Stream/Bounce Judgment.

When two identical objects on a screen move toward each other, coincide at the center of the screen, and then continue to move along their original trajectories to the opposite starting points, observers perceive these visual stimuli as showing one of the two possible scenarios: streaming through or bouncing off each other (stream/bounce perception). Previous research has shown that when a high-arousal face is presented along with the two moving objects, the bouncing percept was predominant, as compared with when a middle- or low-arousal face is presented. In this study, however, such a modulatory effect of the emotional face was eliminated when participants did not judge stream or bounce and the terms "bouncing/streaming" were not used in the experiments.

The sound-free SMARC effect: The spatial-musical association of response codes using only sound imagery.

This study provides clear evidence that the human cognitive system automatically codes sound pitch spatially. The spatial-musical association of response codes (SMARC) effect, in which a high-pitched (low-pitched) tone facilitates an upper (lower) response, is considered to reflect the spatial coding of sound pitch. However, previous studies have not excluded the directional effects of sound localization.

Spatial congruency bias in identifying objects is triggered by retinal position congruence: Examination using the Ternus-Pikler illusion.

When two different objects are sequentially presented at the same location, the viewer tends to misjudge them as identical (spatial congruency bias). The present study examined whether the spatial congruency bias would involve not only retinotopic but also non-retinotopic processing using the Ternus-Pikler illusion. In the experiments, two objects (central and peripheral) appeared in an initial frame.

Task Difficulty Modulates the Disrupting Effects of Oral Respiration on Visual Search Performance.

Previous research has suggested that oral respiration may disturb cognitive function and health. The present study investigated whether oral respiration negatively affects visual attentional processing during a visual search task. Participants performed a visual search task in the following three breathing conditions: wearing a nasal plug, wearing surgical tape over their mouths, or no modification (oral vs.

Implicit Attitudes About Agricultural and Aquatic Products From Fukushima Depend on Where Consumers Reside.

Japanese consumers are still hesitant to purchase products from Fukushima, although 7 years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and these products are officially considered safe. In this study, we examined whether Japanese consumers have negative implicit attitudes toward agricultural and aquatic products from the Fukushima region and whether these attitudes are independent of their explicit attitudes. Japanese students completed an implicit association test and a questionnaire to assess their implicit and explicit attitudes toward products from Fukushima relative to another region.

Spatial-musical association of response codes without sound.

Humans tasked with pressing a key on a computer keyboard in response to a pitch can respond more quickly to a high-pitched sound by pressing a key higher on the keyboard and to a low-pitched sound by pressing a lower key, compared with the opposite configuration. This so-called spatial-musical association of response codes (SMARC) has been considered to reflect the spatial coding of sound pitch rather than to be an artefact of the verbal labels denoting spatial positions for localising sounds. In this study, we completely excluded the latter possibility, that is, the directional effects of automatic sound localisation on the SMARC effect.

Reading habits contribute to the effects of display direction on product choice.

It has been shown that people process assortment variety more efficiently in horizontal displays than in vertical displays, owing to human visual characteristics that favor the horizontal direction. Consequently, the number and variety of products chosen tends to increase when they are arranged horizontally. I show that this horizontal display advantage can be modulated by culture, especially writing and reading habits.

The Gaze-Cueing Effect in the United States and Japan: Influence of Cultural Differences in Cognitive Strategies on Control of Attention.

The direction of gaze automatically and exogenously guides visual spatial attention, a phenomenon termed as the . Although this effect arises when the duration of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a non-predictive gaze cue and the target is relatively long, no empirical research has examined the factors underlying this extended cueing effect. Two experiments compared the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs (700 ms) in Japanese and American participants.

Attentional capture by spatiotemporally task-irrelevant faces: supportive evidence for Sato and Kawahara (2015).

Visual attention is captured exogenously by stimuli that are congruent with the viewer's current behavioral goals or intentions. However, Sato and Kawahara (Psychol Res 79:523-533, 2015) recently suggested that distractor faces capture attention in an entirely stimulus-driven manner without top-down control of attention, which then attenuates subsequent target identification, using a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. We tested this suggestion, developing a hypothesis that the faces used in the previous study served as task-relevant temporal cues that predicted target timing.

Early Visual Perception Potentiated by Object Affordances: Evidence From a Temporal Order Judgment Task.

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task.

[Expansive personal space: Distance between personal belongings reflects the interpersonal distance of their owners].

People feel uncomfortable when someone else comes spatially near and thus encroaches on their personal space (PS). Although many social psychologists have explored characteristics of PS of/between/among individuals so far, there is currently no empirical research on whether the PS of individuals expands into space surrounding their belongings (or objects) that are away from their body. This study measured the spatial distance between bags which participants and confederates left behind, and thus demonstrated that the distance between bags was modulated in response to the interpersonal relationship of their owners.

[The price-based certainty of purchase influences consumer behavior for discount].

Tversky & Kahneman (1981) reported that most participants decided to drive when they could save money on a low-price good as compared to when they could save on a high-price good, even though the discount prices were same. Although this irrational decision making has been interpreted as a rate-dependent estimation of value (prospect theory), this study newly proposes that it can be explained by the certainty of purchase based on the price of goods. Experiment 1 replicated the previously reported difference in decision making, and additionally demonstrated that participants' certainty of purchase was lower for a high- than a low-price good.

Object Affordances Potentiate Responses but Do Not Guide Attentional Prioritization.

Handled objects automatically activate afforded responses. The current experiment examined whether objects that afford a response are also prioritized for attentional processing in visual search. Targets were pictures of coffee cups with handles oriented either to the right or the left.

The social-devaluation effect: interactive evaluation deteriorates likeability of objects based on daily relationship.

Although previous research has explored the effects of discussion on optimal and collective group outcomes, it is unclear how an individual's preference for an object is modulated by discussion with others. This study investigated the determinants of likeability ratings under two conditions. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants consisting of friends evaluated various photographic images.

[Facilitation and inhibition of insightful problem solving based on social comparison].

Intuitively, insight emerges unexpectedly. However, some previous views proposed that insight emerges with a high probability after people recognize their failure in solving a problem. In order to empirically investigate this failure-insight relationship, this study manipulated when participants recognized failure by using social comparison.

Brief and rare mental "breaks" keep you focused: deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements.

We newly propose that the vigilance decrement occurs because the cognitive control system fails to maintain active the goal of the vigilance task over prolonged periods of time (goal habituation). Further, we hypothesized that momentarily deactivating this goal (via a switch in tasks) would prevent the activation level of the vigilance goal from ever habituating. We asked observers to perform a visual vigilance task while maintaining digits in-memory.

Erroneous selection of a non-target item improves subsequent target identification in rapid serial visual presentations.

The second of two targets (T2) embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVSVP) is often missed even though the first (T1) is correctly reported (attentional blink). The rate of correct T2 identification is quite high, however, when T2 comes immediately after T1 (lag-1 sparing). This study investigated whether and how non-target items induce lag-1 sparing.

Contingent attentional capture occurs by activated target congruence.

Contingent attentional capture occurs when a stimulus property captures an observer's attention, usually related to the observer's top-down attentional set for target-defining properties. In this study, we examined whether contingent attentional capture occurs for a distractor that does not share the target-defining property at a physical level, but does share that property at an abstract level of representation. In a rapid serial visual presentation stream, we defined the target by color (e.

Temporal dissociation between category-based and item-based processes in rejecting distractors.

Presenting a target-like distractor in an RSVP task deteriorates the detection of a trailing target, because the visual system has difficulties in rejecting the erroneously accepted distractor. We investigated whether the rejection process is influenced by observers' knowledge regarding possible distractors. Observers identified a letter (target) embedded in a stream of line patterns, rejecting a preceding distractor (digit).

Intertrial inhibition of focused attention in pop-out search.

When a visual search for a color oddball is performed, responses to target-present trials are affected by the color of items in immediately preceding target-absent trials, a phenomenon known as the distractor-previewing effect (DPE). Specifically, the color of the items in the target-absent trial suppresses responses to a target of that color in the subsequent trial, even though participants report a target feature uncorrelated with color. We believe that this suppression reflects a transient inhibitory effect on focused attention that biases attention away from items that are of the same color as the items in the target-absent trial.