Publications by authors named "Laura Mieth"

Two experiments served to examine how people arrive at stimulus-specific prospective judgments about the distracting effects of speech on cognitive performance. The direct-access account implies that people have direct metacognitive access to the cognitive effects of sounds that determine distraction. The processing-fluency account implies that people rely on the processing-fluency heuristic to predict the distracting effects of sounds on cognitive performance.

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The deliberate-morality account implies that moral punishment should be decreased with time pressure and increased with deliberation while the intuitive-morality account predicts the opposite. In three experiments, moral punishment was examined in a simultaneous one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. The players cooperated or defected and then decided whether or not to punish their partners.

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Do people punish others for defecting or for failing to conform to the majority? In two experiments, we manipulated whether the participants' partners cooperated or defected in the majority of the trials of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. The effects of this base-rate manipulation on cooperation and punishment were assessed using a multinomial processing tree model. High compared to low cooperation rates of the partners increased participants' cooperation.

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Two experiments serve to examine how people make metacognitive judgments about the effects of task-irrelevant sounds on cognitive performance. According to the direct-access account, people have direct access to the processes causing auditory distraction. According to the processing-fluency account, people rely on the feeling of processing fluency to make heuristic metacognitive judgments about the distracting effects of sounds.

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The existence of moral punishment, that is, the fact that cooperative people sacrifice resources to punish defecting partners requires an explanation. Potential explanations are that people punish defecting partners to privately express or to communicate their negative emotions in response to the experienced unfairness. If so, then providing participants with alternative ways to privately express or to communicate their emotions should reduce moral punishment.

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The cognitive mechanisms underlying the animacy effect on free recall have as yet to be identified. According to the attentional-prioritization account, animate words are better recalled because they recruit more attention at encoding than inanimate words. The account implies that the animacy effect should be larger when animate words are presented together with inanimate words in mixed lists or pairs than when animate and inanimate words are presented separately in pure lists or pairs.

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The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate participants to generate more ideas than inanimate words at encoding.

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The present study served to test whether emotion modulates auditory distraction in a serial-order reconstruction task. If auditory distraction results from an attentional trade-off between the targets and distractors, auditory distraction should decrease when attention is focused on targets with high negative arousal. Two experiments (with a total N of 284 participants) were conducted to test whether auditory distraction is influenced by target emotion.

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Consumers are exposed to large amounts of advertising every day. One way to avoid being manipulated is to monitor the sources of persuasive messages. In the present study it was tested whether high exposure to advertising affects the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions.

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Words representing living beings are better remembered than words representing nonliving objects, a robust finding called the animacy effect. Considering the postulated evolutionary-adaptive significance of this effect, the animate words' memory advantage should not only affect the quantity but also the quality of remembering. To test this assumption, we compared the quality of recognition memory between animate and inanimate words.

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The present study serves to test whether cooperation and moral punishment are affected by cognitive load. Dual-process theories postulate that moral behavior is intuitive which leads to the prediction that cooperation and moral punishment should remain unaffected or may even increase when cognitive load is induced by a secondary task. However, it has also been proposed that cognitive control and deliberation are necessary to choose an economically costly but morally justified option.

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The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments about the disruptive effects of auditory-deviant, changing-state, and steady-state distractor sequences on serial recall. In a questionnaire, participants read about an irrelevant-speech experiment and were asked to provide metacognitive beliefs about how serial-recall performance would be affected by the different types of distractors.

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To determine the role of moral norms in cooperation and punishment, we examined the effects of a moral-framing manipulation in a Prisoner's Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. In each round of the game, participants decided whether to cooperate or to defect. The Prisoner's Dilemma game was identical for all participants with the exception that the behavioral options were paired with moral labels ("I cooperate" and "I cheat") in the moral-framing condition and with neutral labels ("A" and "B") in the neutral-framing condition.

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The states that learned specific episodic contingencies of item types and source dominate over general schematic expectations in source guessing. However, recent evidence from Bell et al. [(2020).

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Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people have to change their behaviours to slow down the spreading of the virus. Protective measures include self-isolation, social (physical) distancing and compliance with personal hygiene rules, particularly regular and thorough hand washing. Prevalence estimates for the compliance with the COVID-19 measures are often based on direct self-reports.

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The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction postulates that two distinct forms of auditory distraction can be distinguished by whether or not they can be cognitively controlled. While the interference-by-process component of auditory distraction is postulated to be automatic and independent of cognitive control, the stimulus-aspecific attention capture by auditory deviants and the stimulus-specific attentional diversion by auditorily presented distractor sentences should be suppressed by increased task engagement. Here we test whether incentive-induced changes in task engagement affect the disruption of serial recall by auditory deviants (Experiment 1) and distractor sentences (Experiment 2).

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Advertising is seen as an untrustworthy source because of the perceived self-interest of the advertisers in presenting product information in a biased or misleading way. Regulations require advertising messages in print and online media to be labeled as advertisements to allow recipients to take source information into account when judging the credibility of the messages. To date, little is known about how these source tags are remembered.

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People do not always have accurate metacognitive awareness of the conditions that lead to good source memory. In Experiment 1, participants studied words referring to bathroom and kitchen items that were either paired with an expected or unexpected room as the source. Participants provided judgments of item and source learning after each item-source pair.

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Performance in source-monitoring tests is not only determined by source memory but also by source guessing. Source guessing is not random as it is informed by two distinct mechanisms. (1) People may show a schema-based guessing bias and rely on cross-situationally stable world knowledge.

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This registered report aims at replicating the so-called "mnemonic time-travel" effect. Aksentijevic, Brandt, Tsakanikos, and Thorpe (2019) reported that memory was improved when their participants experienced backward motion before a memory test in comparison to when they experienced forward motion or no motion. This finding was interpreted as suggesting that backward motion brought individuals back to the moment of encoding.

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Effects of auditory distraction by task-irrelevant background speech on the immediate serial recall of verbal material are well established. Less is known about the influence of background speech on memory for visual configural information. A recent study demonstrated that face learning is disrupted by joyful music relative to soothing violin music and quiet.

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The animacy effect refers to enhanced memory for animate over inanimate items. In two studies, we examined whether this memory advantage generalises to source memory. A multinomial processing tree model was used to disentangle item recognition, source memory, and guessing processes.

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The key insight behind the adaptive memory framework is that the primary function of remembering is not to help us to relive the past but to inform adaptive behavior in the future. However, the beneficial effects of memory on the individual's fitness are often difficult to study empirically. In the case of social cooperation, it is comparatively easy to derive testable predictions about the relationship between specific types of memory (e.

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Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with a category associated with intelligence ("professor") subsequently performed 13% better on a trivia test than participants primed with a category associated with a lack of intelligence ("soccer hooligans"). In two unpublished replications of this study designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, Dijksterhuis, van Knippenberg, and Holland observed a smaller difference between conditions (2%-3%) as well as a gender difference: Men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.

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Most theories of social exchange distinguish between two different types of cooperation, depending on whether or not cooperation occurs conditional upon the partner's previous behaviors. Here, we used a multinomial processing tree model to distinguish between positive and negative reciprocity and cooperation bias in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game. In Experiments 1 and 2, the facial expressions of the partners were varied to manipulate cooperation bias.

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