A Practical Significance Bias in Laypeople's Evaluation of Scientific Findings.

People often rely on scientific findings to help them make decisions-however, failing to report effect magnitudes might lead to a potential bias in assuming findings are practically significant. Across two online studies (Prolific; = 800), we measured U.S.

How Do Viewers Synthesize Conflicting Information from Data Visualizations?

Scientific knowledge develops through cumulative discoveries that build on, contradict, contextualize, or correct prior findings. Scientists and journalists often communicate these incremental findings to lay people through visualizations and text (e.g.

Causal theory error in college students' understanding of science studies.

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports-or fails to support-a causal claim. This study investigated college students' thinking about causal claims presented in brief media reports describing behavioral science findings.

When and why do people act on flawed science? Effects of anecdotes and prior beliefs on evidence-based decision-making.

Today's citizens are expected to use evidence, frequently presented in the media, to inform decisions about health, behavior, and public policy. However, science misinformation is ubiquitous in the media, making it difficult to apply research appropriately. Across two experiments, we addressed how anecdotes and prior beliefs impact readers' ability to both identify flawed science and make appropriate decisions based on flawed science in media articles.

Visual routines are associated with specific graph interpretations.

We argue that people compare values in graphs with a - attending to data values in an ordered pattern over time. Do these visual routines exist to manage capacity limitations in how many values can be encoded at once, or do they actually affect the relations that are extracted? We measured eye movements while people judged configurations of a two-bar graph based on size only ("[short tall] or [tall short]?") and contrast only ("[light dark] or [dark light]?"). Participants exhibited visual routines in which they systematically attended to a specific feature (or "anchor point") in the graph; in the size task, most participants inspected the taller bar first, and in the contrast task, most participants attended to the darker bar first.

Visual routines for extracting magnitude relations.

Linking relations described in text with relations in visualizations is often difficult. We used eye tracking to measure the optimal way to extract such relations in graphs, college students, and young children (6- and 8-year-olds). Participants compared relational statements ("Are there more blueberries than oranges?") with simple graphs, and two systematic patterns emerged: eye movements that followed the verbal order of the question (inspecting the "blueberry" value first) versus those that followed a left-first bias (regardless of the left value's identity).

Relative contributions of task-relevant and task-irrelevant dimensions in priming of pop-out.

Intertrial effects such as priming of pop-out (PoP) often occur for task-irrelevant dimensions as well as task-relevant dimensions, though to a weaker extent. Here we test the hypothesis that increased priming for task-relevant dimensions is due to greater passive build-up of priming for the task-relevant dimension rather than to an active filtering of task-irrelevant dimensions; if this is the case, then we should observe a positive correlation between the magnitude of task-relevant and task-irrelevant priming. We tested this hypothesis using a pop-out search task in which the task-relevant dimension was orientation and the task-irrelevant dimension was color.