Available and unavailable decoys in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) decision-making.

Decision-making has been observed to be systematically affected by decoys, i.e., options that should be irrelevant, either because unavailable or because manifestly inferior to other alternatives, and yet shift preferences towards their target.

Context-effect bias in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.): exploring decoy influences in a value-based food choice task.

Decision making is known to be liable to several context effects. In particular, adding a seemingly irrelevant alternative (decoy) to a set of options can modify preferences: typically, by increasing choices towards whatever option clearly dominates the decoy (attraction effect), but occasionally also decreasing its appeal and generating a shift in the opposite direction (repulsion effect). Both types of decoy effects violate rational choice theory axioms and suggest dynamic processes of preference-formation, in which the value of each alternative is not determined a priori, but it is instead constructed by comparing options during the decision process.

Facial impression of trustworthiness biases statement credibility unless suppressed by facemask.

Unlabelled: The impression of trustworthiness based on someone's facial appearance biases our subsequent behavior toward that subject in a variety of contexts. In this study, we investigated whether facial trustworthiness also biases the credibility of utterances associated with that face (H1). We explored whether this bias is mitigated by utterances eliciting reasoning, i.

Trusting COVID-19 vaccines as individual and social goal.

Trust in vaccines and in the institutions responsible for their management is a key asset in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. By means of a structured multi-scales survey based on the socio-cognitive model of trust, this study investigates the interplay of institutional trust, confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, information habits, personal motivations, and background beliefs on the pandemic in determining willingness to vaccinate in a sample of Italian respondents (N = 4096). We observe substantial trust in public institutions and a strong vaccination intention.

The presence of a potential competitor modulates risk preferences in rats.

Although both human and non-human animals, in everyday life, deal with risky decisions in a social environment, few studies investigated how social dimension influences risk preferences (i.e., if consequences on others feeds back over own choice).

The impact of facemasks on emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification.

Covid-19 pandemics has fostered a pervasive use of facemasks all around the world. While they help in preventing infection, there are concerns related to the possible impact of facemasks on social communication. The present study investigates how emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification of faces differ when faces are seen without mask, with a standard medical facemask, and with a transparent facemask restoring visual access to the mouth region.

Are capuchin monkeys ( spp.) sensitive to lost opportunities? The role of opportunity costs in intertemporal choice.

Principles of economics predict that the costs associated with obtaining rewards can influence choice. When individuals face choices between a smaller, immediate option and a larger, later option, they often experience opportunity costs associated with waiting for delayed rewards because they must forego the opportunity to make other choices. We evaluated how reducing opportunity costs affects delay tolerance in capuchin monkeys.

All We Need Is Trust: How the COVID-19 Outbreak Reconfigured Trust in Italian Public Institutions.

The central focus of this research is the fast and crucial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a crucial psychological, relational, and political construct: trust. We investigate how the consequences of the pandemic, in terms of healthcare, state intervention and impositions, and daily life and habits, have affected trust in public institutions in Italy, at the time when the contagion was rapidly spreading in the country (early March 2020). In this survey, addressed to 4260 Italian citizens, we analyzed and measured such impact, focusing on various aspects of trust.

Contextual factors modulate risk preferences in adult humans.

Humans have generally been considered risk averse for gains. Yet, growing evidence shows that risk preferences may change across reward currencies and depend on the type of tasks used to measure them. Here, we examined how context affects human risk preferences to shed light on the psychological mechanisms underlying human decision-making under risk.

Mental time travel in mild cognitive impairment.

: Mental Time Travel (MTT) is the people's ability to remember themselves in the past and to imagine themselves in the future, and influence important life domains such as making decisions and planning future actions. It is widely recognized that patients with aMCI have deficits in episodic memory, but they also show impairments in semantic memory. It has been controversial whether MTT tasks are disturbed in aMCI mainly in relation to internal details related to episodic information, or external details, representing semantic and other extraneous information.

Decoy effects in intertemporal and probabilistic choices the role of time pressure, immediacy, and certainty.

A decoy is an irrelevant option that, when added to a binary choice, is not selected but nonetheless alters the subjects' preferences, systematically biasing towards its target. The decoy effect, also known as attraction effect, is considered an anomaly of rational decision-making, albeit its applicability to real-life choices outside of laboratory settings has been challenged. In particular, when decoys have been studied in choices between outcomes occurring at different points in time, i.

Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach.

Evidence is growing that forms of incivility-e.g. aggressive and disrespectful behaviors, harassment, hate speech and outrageous claims-are spreading in the population of social networking sites' (SNS) users.

Delay discounting in mild cognitive impairment.

Introduction: Patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may make suboptimal decisions particularly in complex situations, and this could be due to temporal discounting, the tendency to prefer immediate rewards over delayed but larger rewards. The present study proposes to evaluate intertemporal preferences in MCI patients as compared to healthy controls.

Method: Fifty-five patients with MCI and 57 healthy controls underwent neuropsychological evaluation and a delay discounting questionnaire, which evaluates three parameters: hyperbolic discounting (k), the percentage of choices for delayed and later rewards (%LL), and response consistency (Acc).

Time Perception in Mild Cognitive Impairment: Interval Length and Subjective Passage of Time.

Objectives: Patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may have difficulties in time perception, which in turn might contribute to some of their symptoms, especially memory deficits. The aim of this study was to evaluate perception of interval length and subjective passage of time in MCI patients as compared to healthy controls.

Methods: Fifty-five MCI patients and 57 healthy controls underwent an experimental protocol for time perception on interval length, a questionnaire for the subjective passage of time and a neuropsychological evaluation.

Social choice for one: On the rationality of intertemporal decisions.

When faced with an intertemporal choice between a smaller short-term reward and a larger long-term prize, is opting for the latter always indicative of delay tolerance? And is delay tolerance always to be regarded as a manifestation of self-control, and thus as a rational solution to intertemporal dilemmas? I argue in favor of a negative answer to both questions, based on evidence collected in the delay discounting literature. This highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of rationality in intertemporal choice, to capture also situations in which waiting is not the optimal strategy. This paper suggests that such an understanding is fostered by adopting social choice theory as a promising framework to model intertemporal decision making.

False belief understanding and "cool" inhibitory control in 3-and 4-years-old Italian children.

During preschool years, major developments occur in both executive function and theory of mind (ToM), and several studies have demonstrated a correlation between these processes. Research on the development of inhibitory control (IC) has distinguished between more cognitive, "cool" aspects of self-control, measured by conflict tasks, that require inhibiting an habitual response to generate an arbitrary one, and "hot," affective aspects, such as affective decision making, measured by delay tasks, that require inhibition of a prepotent response. The aim of this study was to investigate the relations between 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on a task measuring false belief understanding, the most widely used index of ToM in preschoolers, and three tasks measuring cognitive versus affective aspects of IC.

When is it worth waiting for? Food quantity, but not food quality, affects delay tolerance in tufted capuchin monkeys.

When faced with choices between smaller sooner options and larger later options (i.e. intertemporal choices), both humans and non-human animals discount future rewards.

Investigating intertemporal choice through experimental evolutionary robotics.

In intertemporal choices, subjects face a trade-off between value and delay: achieving the most valuable outcome requires a longer time, whereas the immediately available option is objectively poorer. Intertemporal choices are ubiquitous, and comparative studies reveal commonalities and differences across species: all species devalue future rewards as a function of delay (delay aversion), yet there is a lot of inter-specific variance in how rapidly such devaluation occurs. These differences are often interpreted in terms of ecological rationality, as depending on environmental factors (e.

Is it patience or motivation? On motivational confounds in intertemporal choice tasks.

Intertemporal choices create a tension between amount maximization, which would favor the larger and later option (LL), and delay minimization, which would promote the smaller and sooner reward (SS). Two common interpretations of intertemporal choice behavior are discussed: looking at LL responses as indicative of self-control, and using intertemporal choices to assess delay aversion. We argue that both interpretations need to take into account motivational confounds, in order to be warranted by data.

Nonhuman gamblers: lessons from rodents, primates, and robots.

The search for neuronal and psychological underpinnings of pathological gambling in humans would benefit from investigating related phenomena also outside of our species. In this paper, we present a survey of studies in three widely different populations of agents, namely rodents, non-human primates, and robots. Each of these populations offers valuable and complementary insights on the topic, as the literature demonstrates.

Waiting by mistake: symbolic representation of rewards modulates intertemporal choice in capuchin monkeys, preschool children and adult humans.

In the Delay choice task subjects choose between a smaller immediate option and a larger delayed option. This paradigm, also known as intertemporal choice task, is frequently used to assess delay tolerance, interpreting a preference for the larger delayed option as willingness to wait. However, in the Delay choice task subjects face a dilemma between two preferred responses: "go for more" (i.

How capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) behaviorally cope with increasing delay in a self-control task.

Displacement activities are behavior patterns apparently irrelevant to the situation in which they are performed that facilitate transitions between behavioral states. Scratching is one of the most commonly described displacement activities in primates and is related to frustration and anxiety. In chimpanzees scratching during cognitive tasks increases with task difficulty.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can wait, when they choose to: a study with the hybrid delay task.

Self-control has been studied in nonhuman animals using a variety of tasks. The inter-temporal choice (ITC) task presents choices between smaller-sooner (SS) and larger-later (LL) options. Using food amounts as rewards, this presents two problems: (a) choices of the LL option could either reflect self-control or instead result from animals' difficulty with pointing to smaller amounts of food; (b) there is no way to verify whether the subjects would not revert their choice for the LL option, if given the opportunity to do so during the ensuing delay.

Delay choice versus delay maintenance: different measures of delayed gratification in capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella).

Delaying gratification involves 2 components: (1) delay choice (selecting a delayed reward over an immediate one) and (2) delay maintenance (sustaining the decision to delay gratification even if the immediate reward is available during the delay). Two tasks most commonly have explored these components in primates: the intertemporal choice task and the accumulation task. It is unclear whether these tasks provide equivalent measures of delay of gratification.