Distinguishing between intrinsic and instrumental sources of the value of choice.

Considerable evidence suggests that people value the freedom to choose. However, it is unclear whether this preference for choice stems purely from choice's intrinsic value, or whether people prefer to choose because it tends to provide instrumental information about desirable outcomes. To address this question, participants completed a novel choice task in which they could freely choose to exert choice or not, manipulating the level of instrumental contingency between participants' choices and eventual outcomes, which we operationalized using the information-theoretic concept of mutual information.

Bayesian mediation analysis in trauma research.

Objective: Bayesian methods are growing in popularity among social scientists, due to the significant advantages offered to researchers: namely, intuitive probabilistic interpretations of results. Here, we highlight the benefits of using the Bayesian framework in research where collecting large samples is challenging, specifically: the absence of a requirement of large samples for convergence, and the possibility of building on prior research by including informative priors.

Method: We demonstrate how to fit a single mediator model and impute missing data in the Bayesian framework using the software JAGS via the R package rjags.

Reward at encoding but not retrieval modulates memory for detailed events.

Much of the evidence suggesting that rewards improve memory performance has focused on how explicit rewards facilitate encoding of simplistic stimuli. To expand beyond this focus, the current study tested how explicit rewards presented at encoding as well as retrieval facilitate memory for information contained within complex events. In a single experimental session, participants (N = 88) encoded videos depicting naturalistic events (e.

The impact of pandemic-related worry on cognitive functioning and risk-taking.

Here, we sought to quantify the effects of experienced fear and worry, engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic, on both cognitive abilities-speed of information processing, task-set shifting, and proactive control-as well as economic risk-taking. Leveraging a repeated-measures cross-sectional design, we examined the performance of 1517 participants, collected during the early phase of the pandemic in the US (April-June 2020), finding that self-reported pandemic-related worry predicted deficits in information processing speed and maintenance of goal-related contextual information. In a classic economic risk-taking task, we observed that worried individuals' choices were more sensitive to the described outcome probabilities of risky actions.

Confidence in risky value-based choice.

Risk engenders a phenomenologically distinct experience from certainty, often driving people to behave in ostensibly irrational ways, and with potential consequences for our subjective sense of confidence in having made the best choice. While previous work on decision confidence has largely focused on ambiguous perceptual decisions or value-based choices under certainty, it is unclear how subjective confidence reports are formed during risky value-based choice (i.e.

Changes in the experience of time: The impact of spatial information on the perception and memory of duration.

Although it is understood that our experience of time is fluid and subjective, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well described. Based on event segmentation theory, we tested the hypothesis that changes in the context, particularly the spatial context, of an experience impact how an individual perceives (encodes) and remembers the length of that event. A group of participants viewed short videos of scenes from movies that either contained shifts in spatial context (e.

Task-evoked pupillary responses track effort exertion: Evidence from task-switching.

A spate of research has examined how individuals regulate effortful processing in service of goal-directed behaviors. One key challenge in developing an account of this regulation is quantifying the momentary amount of cognitive effort exerted by an individual in service of their goals. A growing body of literature has suggested using task-evoked pupil dilations as a potential psychophysiological index of cognitive effort; however, it remains unclear whether pupil diameter indexes effort exertion or merely reflects task load, as both are tightly intertwined.