Choice enhances touch pleasantness.

We value what we choose more than what is imposed upon us. Choice-induced preferences are extensively demonstrated using behavioural and neural methods, mainly involving rewarding objects such as money or material goods. However, the impact of choice on experiences, especially in the realm of affective touch, remains less explored.

Digital contact does not promote wellbeing, but face-to-face contact does: A cross-national survey during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With restricted face-to-face interactions, COVID-19 lockdowns and distancing measures tested the capability of computer-mediated communication to foster social contact and wellbeing. In a multinational sample ( = 6436), we investigated how different modes of contact related to wellbeing during the pandemic. Computer-mediated communication was more common than face-to-face, and its use was influenced by COVID-19 death rates, more so than state stringency measures.

Delusion-like beliefs and data quality: Are classic cognitive biases artifacts of carelessness?

There is widespread agreement that delusions in clinical populations and delusion-like beliefs in the general population are, in part, caused by cognitive biases. Much of the evidence comes from two influential tasks: the Beads Task and the Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence Task. However, research using these tasks has been hampered by conceptual and empirical inconsistencies.

Explanations in the wild.

Why do some explanations strike people as highly satisfying while others, seemingly equally accurate, satisfy them less? We asked laypeople to generate and rate thousands of open-ended explanations in response to 'Why?' questions spanning multiple domains, and analyzed the properties of these explanations to discover (1) what kinds of features are associated with greater explanation quality; (2) whether people can tell how good their explanations are; and (3) which cognitive traits predict the ability to generate good explanations. Our results support a pluralistic view of explanation, where satisfaction is best predicted by either functional or mechanistic content. Respondents were better able to judge how accurate their explanations were than how satisfying they were to others.

From Puzzle to Progress: How Engaging With Neurodiversity Can Improve Cognitive Science.

In cognitive science, there is a tacit norm that phenomena such as cultural variation or synaesthesia are worthy examples of cognitive diversity that contribute to a better understanding of cognition, but that other forms of cognitive diversity (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ADHD, and dyslexia) are primarily interesting only as examples of deficit, dysfunction, or impairment.

Caricatured facial movements enhance perception of emotional facial expressions.

Although faces "in the wild" constantly undergo complicated movements, humans adeptly perceive facial identity and expression. Previous studies, focusing mainly on identity, used photographic caricature to show that distinctive form increases perceived dissimilarity. We tested whether distinctive facial showed similar effects, and we focussed on both perception of expression and identity We caricatured the movements of an animated computer head, using physical motion metrics extracted from videos.

The Diversity Gap: When Diversity Matters for Knowledge.

Can diversity make for better science? Although diversity has ethical and political value, arguments for its epistemic value require a bridge between normative and mechanistic considerations, demonstrating and diversity benefits collective intelligence. However, a major hurdle is that the benefits themselves are rather mixed: Quantitative evidence from psychology and behavioral sciences sometimes shows a positive epistemic effect of diversity, but often shows a null effect, or even a negative effect. Here we argue that to make progress with these and questions, we need first to rethink one ought to expect a benefit of cognitive diversity.

Collectively jumping to conclusions: Social information amplifies the tendency to gather insufficient data.

False beliefs can spread within societies even when they are costly and when individuals share access to the same objective reality. Research on the cultural evolution of misbeliefs has demonstrated that a social context can explain what people think but not whether it also explains how people think. We shift the focus from the diffusion of false beliefs to the diffusion of suboptimal belief-formation strategies and identify a novel mechanism whereby misbeliefs arise and spread.

Social influence matters: We follow pandemic guidelines most when our close circle does.

Why do we adopt new rules, such as social distancing? Although human sciences research stresses the key role of social influence in behaviour change, most COVID-19 campaigns emphasize the disease's medical threat. In a global data set (n = 6,675), we investigated how social influences predict people's adherence to distancing rules during the pandemic. Bayesian regression analyses controlling for stringency of local measures showed that people distanced most when they thought their close social circle did.

Face space representations of movement.

The challenging computational problem of perceiving dynamic faces "in the wild" goes unresolved because most research focuses on easier questions about static photograph perception. This literature conceptualizes face representation as a dissimilarity-based "face space", with axes that describe the dimensions of static images. Some versions express positions in face space relative to a central tendency (norm).

Perspective taking in a novel signaling task: Effects of world knowledge and contextual constraint.

Perspective taking-the ability to see things from someone else's point of view-can boost success in communication. A signaler might take perspective when designing an utterance that is informative from the receiver's point of view, or the receiver might take perspective when inferring the signaler's communicative intentions. Perspective taking is supposed to play a particularly vital role when people try to communicate in the absence of a conventional signaling system.

Cognitive mechanisms for inferring the meaning of novel signals during symbolisation.

As participants repeatedly interact using graphical signals (as in a game of Pictionary), the signals gradually shift from being iconic (or motivated) to being symbolic (or arbitrary). The aim here is to test experimentally whether this change in the form of the signal implies a concomitant shift in the inferential mechanisms needed to understand it. The results show that, during early, iconic stages, there is more reliance on creative inferential processes associated with insight problem solving, and that the recruitment of these cognitive mechanisms decreases over time.