Simulation requires activation of self-knowledge to change self-concept.

Simulating other people can shift one's self-concept, an effect known as simulation-induced malleability. How does imagining others shift the self? We propose that the activation of self-knowledge is the key factor by which simulation of others alters one's self-concept. We test this possibility across four studies that each manipulate self-knowledge activation indirectly during simulation and measure the impact on subsequent self-ratings.

Bimodal spore release heights in the water column enhance local retention and population connectivity of bull kelp, .

Dispersal of reproductive propagules determines recruitment patterns and connectivity among populations and can influence how populations respond to major disturbance events. Dispersal distributions can depend on propagule release strategies. For instance, the bull kelp, , can release propagules (spores) from two heights in the water column ("bimodal release"): at the water surface, directly from the reproductive tissues (sori) on the kelp's blades, and near the seafloor after the sori abscise and sink through the water column.

Top-predator recovery abates geomorphic decline of a coastal ecosystem.

The recovery of top predators is thought to have cascading effects on vegetated ecosystems and their geomorphology, but the evidence for this remains correlational and intensely debated. Here we combine observational and experimental data to reveal that recolonization of sea otters in a US estuary generates a trophic cascade that facilitates coastal wetland plant biomass and suppresses the erosion of marsh edges-a process that otherwise leads to the severe loss of habitats and ecosystem services. Monitoring of the Elkhorn Slough estuary over several decades suggested top-down control in the system, because the erosion of salt marsh edges has generally slowed with increasing sea otter abundance, despite the consistently increasing physical stress in the system (that is, nutrient loading, sea-level rise and tidal scour).

Sediment carbon storage differs in native and non-native Caribbean seagrass beds.

Non-native species are expanding globally and can alter ecosystem functions, including food web dynamics, community structure and carbon storage. Seagrass are foundation species that contribute a variety of ecosystem services in near-shore coastal ecosystems, including a significant sink of carbon. In the Caribbean, the rapidly expanding non-native Halophila stipulacea has unknown impacts on carbon storage.

Herbivory limits success of vegetation restoration globally.

Restoring vegetation in degraded ecosystems is an increasingly common practice for promoting biodiversity and ecological function, but successful implementation is hampered by an incomplete understanding of the processes that limit restoration success. By synthesizing terrestrial and aquatic studies globally (2594 experimental tests from 610 articles), we reveal substantial herbivore control of vegetation under restoration. Herbivores at restoration sites reduced vegetation abundance more strongly (by 89%, on average) than those at relatively undegraded sites and suppressed, rather than fostered, plant diversity.

A Fluid Self-Concept: How the Brain Maintains Coherence and Positivity across an Interconnected Self-Concept While Incorporating Social Feedback.

People experience instances of social feedback as interdependent with potential implications for their entire self-concept. How do people maintain positivity and coherence across the self-concept while updating self-views from feedback? We present a network model describing how the brain represents the semantic dependency relations among traits and uses this information to avoid an overall loss of positivity and coherence. Both male and female human participants received social feedback during a self-evaluation task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Stereotypes disrupt probabilistic category learning.

Racial stereotypes exert pernicious effects on decision-making and behavior, yet little is known about how stereotypes disrupt people's ability to learn new associations. The current research interrogates a fundamental question about the boundary conditions of probabilistic learning by examining whether and how learning is influenced by preexisting associations. Across three experiments, participants learned the probabilistic outcomes of different card combinations based on feedback in either a social (e.

Uncertain threat is associated with greater impulsive actions and neural dissimilarity to Black versus White faces.

Race is a social construct that contributes to group membership and heightens emotional arousal in intergroup contexts. Little is known about how emotional arousal, specifically uncertain threat, influences behavior and brain processes in response to race information. We investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated uncertain threat on impulsive actions to Black versus White faces in a community sample (n = 106) of Black and White adults.

Computational underpinnings of partisan information processing biases and associations with depth of cognitive reasoning.

Despite unprecedented access to information, partisans increasingly disagree about basic facts that are backed by data, posing a serious threat to a democracy that relies on finding common ground based on objective truths. We examine the underpinnings of this phenomenon using drift diffusion modeling (DDM). Partisans (N = 148) completed a sequential sampling task where they evaluated the honesty of Democrat or Republican politicians during a debate based on fact-check scores.

Mapping the self: A network approach for understanding psychological and neural representations of self-concept structure.

How people self-reflect and maintain a coherent sense of self is an important question that spans from early philosophy to modern psychology and neuroscience. Research on the self-concept has not yet developed and tested a formal model of how beliefs about dependency relations amongst traits may influence self-concept coherence. We first develop a network-based approach, which suggests that people's beliefs about trait relationships contribute to how the self-concept is structured (Study 1).

Partisan-motivated sampling: Re-examining politically motivated reasoning across the information processing stream.

The United States is increasingly politically polarized, fueling intergroup conflict and intensifying partisan biases in cognition and behavior. To date, research on intergroup bias has separately examined biases in how people search for information and how they interpret information. Here, we integrate these two perspectives to elucidate how partisan biases manifest across the information processing stream, beginning with (a) a biased selection of information, leading to (b) skewed samples of information that interact with (c) motivated interpretations to produce evaluative biases.

Learning About the Self: Motives for Coherence and Positivity Constrain Learning From Self-Relevant Social Feedback.

People learn about themselves from social feedback, but desires for coherence and positivity constrain how feedback is incorporated into the self-concept. We developed a network-based model of the self-concept and embedded it in a reinforcement-learning framework to provide a computational account of how motivations shape self-learning from feedback. Participants ( = 46 adult university students) received feedback while evaluating themselves on traits drawn from a causal network of trait semantics.

Who wins or loses matters: Strongly interacting consumers drive seagrass resistance under ocean acidification.

Global stressors are increasingly altering ecosystem resistance, resilience, and functioning by reorganizing vital species interactions. However, our predictive understanding of these changes is hindered by failures to consider species-specific functional roles and stress responses within communities. Stressor-driven loss or reduced performance of strongly interacting species may generate abrupt shifts in ecosystem states and functions.

Rapid enhancement of multiple ecosystem services following the restoration of a coastal foundation species.

The global decline of marine foundation species (kelp forests, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses) has contributed to the degradation of the coastal zone and threatens the loss of critical ecosystem services and functions. Restoration of marine foundation species has had variable success, especially for seagrasses, where a majority of restoration efforts have failed. While most seagrass restorations track structural attributes over time, rarely do restorations assess the suite of ecological functions that may be affected by restoration.

Causal Inference Gates Corticostriatal Learning.

Attributing outcomes to your own actions or to external causes is essential for appropriately learning which actions lead to reward and which actions do not. Our previous work showed that this type of credit assignment is best explained by a Bayesian reinforcement learning model which posits that beliefs about the causal structure of the environment modulate reward prediction errors (RPEs) during action value updating. In this study, we investigated the brain networks underlying reinforcement learning that are influenced by causal beliefs using functional magnetic resonance imaging while human participants ( = 31; 13 males, 18 females) completed a behavioral task that manipulated beliefs about causal structure.

The Double Bind of Communicating About Zoonotic Origins: Describing Exotic Animal Sources of COVID-19 Increases Both Healthy and Discriminatory Avoidance Intentions.

Many novel diseases are of zoonotic origin, likely including COVID-19. Describing diseases as originating from a diverse range of animals is known to increase risk perceptions and intentions to engage in preventative behaviors. However, it is also possible that communications depicting use of exotic animals as food sources may activate stereotypes of cultures at the origin of a disease, increasing discriminatory behaviors and disease stigma.

Processing of Task-Irrelevant Race Information is Associated with Diminished Cognitive Control in Black and White Individuals.

The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants.

Self-choice preference: The propensity to under-delegate irrespective of sense of control.

People are more likely to make choices themselves than delegate to an agent, even when it may not be the most optimal decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. Previous studies have demonstrated that retaining authority and controllability might be the primary reason for preferring self-choice. The current study asks whether impairment of controllability associated with self-choice can increase the rate of delegation and whether there are self-other discrepancies in self-choice preference.

Assessing anthropogenic risk to sea otters () for reintroduction into San Francisco Bay.

Southern sea otters have been actively managed for their conservation and recovery since listing on the federal Endangered Species Act in 1977. Still, they remain constrained to a geographically small area on the central coast of California relative to their former coast-wide range, with population numbers far below those of the estimated optimal sustainable population size. Species managers have discussed reintroducing southern sea otters into parts of their historic range to facilitate sustained population growth and geographic range expansion.

Climate drives the geography of marine consumption by changing predator communities.

The global distribution of primary production and consumption by humans (fisheries) is well-documented, but we have no map linking the central ecological process of consumption within food webs to temperature and other ecological drivers. Using standardized assays that span 105° of latitude on four continents, we show that rates of bait consumption by generalist predators in shallow marine ecosystems are tightly linked to both temperature and the composition of consumer assemblages. Unexpectedly, rates of consumption peaked at midlatitudes (25 to 35°) in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres across both seagrass and unvegetated sediment habitats.

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing.

People tend to believe that their perceptions are veridical representations of the world, but also commonly report perceiving what they want to see or hear. It remains unclear whether this reflects an actual change in what people perceive or merely a bias in their responding. Here we manipulated the percept that participants wanted to see as they performed a visual categorization task.

Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception.

A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one's own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces.

Causal Inference About Good and Bad Outcomes.

People learn differently from good and bad outcomes. We argue that valence-dependent learning asymmetries are partly driven by beliefs about the causal structure of the environment. If hidden causes can intervene to generate bad (or good) outcomes, then a rational observer will assign blame (or credit) to these hidden causes, rather than to the stable outcome distribution.