Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies.

People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations.

Can we learn from errors? Retrieval facilitates the correction of false memories for pragmatic inferences.

Errorful learning suggests that, when perfect learning has not yet been attained, errors can enhance future learning if followed by corrective feedback. Research on memory updating has shown that after retrieval, memory becomes more malleable and prone to change. Thus, retrieval of a wrong answer might provide a good context for the incorporation of feedback.

Incidental exposure to hedonic and healthy food features affects food preferences one day later.

Memories acquired incidentally from exposure to food information in the environment may often become active to later affect food preferences. Because conscious use of these memories is not requested or required, these incidental learning effects constitute a form of indirect memory. In an experiment using a novel food preference paradigm (n = 617), we found that brief incidental exposure to hedonic versus healthy food features indirectly affected food preferences a day later, explaining approximately 10% of the variance in preferences for tasty versus healthy foods.

Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences.

Human memory can be unreliable, and when reading a sentence with a pragmatic implication, such as "," people often falsely remember that the karate champion "" the cinder block. Yet, research has shown that encoding instructions affect the false memories we form. On the one hand, instructing participants to imagine themselves manipulating the to-be-recalled items increase false memories (imagination inflation effect).

Break the Ice: a Survey on Socially Aware Engagement for Human-Robot First Encounters.

Society is starting to come up with exciting applications for social robots like butlers, coaches, and waiters. However, these robots face a challenging task: to meet people during a first encounter. This survey explores the literature that contributes to this task.

Learning what to inhibit: The influence of repeated testing on the encoding of gender and age information.

Psychological research has devoted considerable attention to the relationship between the multiple category dimensions that can be extracted from faces. In the present studies, we investigated the role of experience and learning on the way the social perceiver deals with multiple category dimensions. Specifically, we tested whether learning which of 2 dimensions is the most relevant to the task at hand influences the encoding and retrieval of both task-relevant and irrelevant dimensions.

How Your Power Affects My Impression of You.

In the present article, we investigate how a person's power affects the way we infer traits from their behavior. In Experiment 1, our results suggest that, when faced with behavioral descriptions about others, participants infer both positive and negative traits about powerless actors, whereas for powerful and control (power irrelevant) actors, only positive but no negative traits are inferred, an effect we call the benevolence bias. In the second experiment, (a) we replicate this effect, (b) we show that it does not depend on the specific traits used in Experiment 1, and (c) we show that it is also detected when an implicit measure of inferences is used.

Memory and conceptual learning of relevant and non-relevant items in item-method directed forgetting.

The present research investigates the fate of non-target information when people are trying to either intentionally memorise or forget target information. By using an object-based attentional manipulation within a directed forgetting paradigm (item-method), we show a directed forgetting effect (DFE, i.e.

Off the top of my head: Malleability and stability in natural categories.

Previous research has found that category representations are highly malleable knowledge structures, varying widely across different contexts and individuals. However, it has also been found that such malleability does not apply equally to all types of category information. The present research further investigates the representational malleability versus stability of natural taxonomic categories.

Inferential Costs of Trait Centrality in Impression Formation: Organization in Memory and Misremembering.

An extension of the DRM paradigm was used to study the impact of central traits (Asch, 1946) in impression formation. Traits corresponding to the four clusters of the implicit theory of personality-intellectual, positive and negative; and social, positive and negative (Rosenberg et al., 1968)-were used to develop lists containing several traits of one cluster and one central trait prototypical of the opposite cluster.

The future is now: the impact of present fluency in judgments about the future.

Recent research has emphasised the role of episodic memory in both remembering past events and in envisaging future events. On the other hand, it has been repeatedly shown that judgments about past events are affected by the fluency with which retrieval cues are processed. In this paper we investigate whether perceptual fluency also plays a role in judgments about future events.

"To-be-forgotten" statements become less true: Memory processes involved in selection and forgetting lead to truthfulness changes of ambiguous sentences.

What happens when people try to forget something? What are the consequences of instructing people to intentionally forget a sentence? Recent studies employing the item-method directed forgetting paradigm have shown that to-be-forgotten (TBF) items are, in a subsequent task, emotionally devaluated relative to to-be-remembered (TBR) items, an aftereffect of memory selection (Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou & Bajo, 2016). As such, distractor devaluation by attentional selection generalizes to memory selection. In this study, we use the item-method directed forgetting paradigm to test the effects of memory selection and inhibition on truth judgments of ambiguous sentences.

Explaining the persistence of false memories: a proposal based on associative activation and thematic extraction.

This study aimed to analyse the effect of retention intervals on associative and thematic false memories. Two experiments, using two types of critical items that were either associatively or thematically related to studied material, were conducted. In both experiments, one group of participants performed a recognition test immediately after the presentation of lists, and another group performed the task one week later.

Stimulus-Response Bindings in the Go/NoGo Task: Effects on the Judged Typicality of Stimuli.

In the present paper, we explore the notion that judgments of typicality are dependent on the goal-relevancy of exemplars. However, we propose that relevancy can be derived from the response provided to stimulus, through the operation of stimulus-response bindings. Specifically, items associated with selection responses are tagged as "relevant" and will be subsequently judged as more typical of their categories, while stimuli associated with avoidance responses are tagged as "irrelevant" will be judged as less typical of their categories.

Too young to correct: a developmental test of the three-stage model of social inference.

The 3-stage model of social inference posits that people categorize behaviors and characterize actors or situations effortlessly, but they correct these characterizations with additional information effortfully. The current article tests this model using developmental data, assuming that the less cognitively demanding processes in the model (i.e.

Buy three but get only two: the smallest effect in a 2 × 2 ANOVA is always uninterpretable.

Loftus (Memory & Cognition 6:312-319, 1978) distinguished between interpretable and uninterpretable interactions. Uninterpretable interactions are ambiguous, because they may be due to two additive main effects (no interaction) and a nonlinear relationship between the (latent) outcome variable and its indicator. Interpretable interactions can only be due to the presence of a true interactive effect in the outcome variable, regardless of the relationship that it establishes with its indicator.

Adapting to test structure: letting testing teach what to learn.

We propose that we encode and store information as a function of the particular ways we have used similar information in the past. More specifically, we contend that the experience of retrieval can serve as a powerful cue to the most effective ways to encode similar information in comparable future learning episodes. To explore these ideas, we did two studies in which all participants went through study-test cycles of single category lists while we manipulated the nature of the recognition tests.

Both associative activation and thematic extraction count, but thematic false memories are more easily rejected.

The main aim of this study was to analyse the roles played by associative activation and thematic extraction in the explanation of false memories using the Deese, Roediger, McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Associative lists with two different types of critical items (CIs) were used: one, the associative CI, corresponded to the word most strongly primed by the associates in the list and another, the thematic CI, was the word that best described the theme of the list. Following three different types of encoding instructions (standard, warning or strategic), false recognition for these two types of CIs was analysed in either self-paced or speeded response recognition tests.

Enhancing the comparability between part-list cueing and collaborative recall: a gradual part-list cueing paradigm.

The effects of part-list cueing and of collaborative recall in memory performance have been recently addressed as parallel phenomena. Notably they both impair recall (and boost frequency estimates) and they have been explained by the same underlying mechanisms. However, the comparability between the two paradigms is hindered by a number of procedural differences.

"Identify-to-reject": a specific strategy to avoid false memories in the DRM paradigm.

Previous research using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm has shown that lists of associates in which the critical words were easily identified as the themes of the lists produce lower levels of false memories in adults. In an attempt to analyze whether this effect is due to the application of a specific memory-editing process (the identify-to-reject strategy), two experiments manipulated variables that are likely to disrupt this strategy either at encoding or at retrieval. In Experiment 1, lists were presented at a very fast presentation rate to reduce the possibility of identifying the missing critical word as the theme of the list, and in Experiment 2, participants were pressed to give yes/no recognition answers within a very short time.

Friends and Foes of Theory Construction in Psychological Science: Vague Dichotomies, Unified Theories of Cognition, and the New Experimentalism.

Newell (1973) criticized the use of vague theoretical dichotomies to account for narrowly defined empirical phenomena. Many of the problems raised by Newell persist today. We argue that these problems derive not from any peculiarity of psychological science but from the hindrances inherent to empirical theory testing.

Cognitive and contextual variables in sexual partner and relationship perception.

This study examined the effects of contextual and cognitive variables for sexual protection on perceived social relationship factors. University students (108 women and 108 men) read script-based narratives on sexual encounters in which six variables were manipulated in two independent analyses. In the first analysis, four variables were evaluated: relational context (stable, casual), condom use (yes, no), script terminus (beginning, middle or end), and the rater's sex.

Cognition and native-language grammar: the organizational role of adjective--noun word order in information representation.

In the present research, we investigated the influence of native-language adjective-noun word order on category accessibility for nouns and adjectives by comparing Portuguese speakers (in whose language nouns precede adjectives) with English speakers (in whose language adjectives precede nouns). In two studies, we presented participants with different numbers of verbal or pictorial stimuli, and subsequently they answered questions about noun- and adjective-conditioned frequencies. The results demonstrated a primacy effect of native-language word order.

Condom inclusion in cognitive representations of sexual encounters.

To identify the inclusion of condom use (N = 360 college students), two sexual scripts (stable and casual relationships) were identified by free-generation methods (Study 1) and used to develop open-ended narratives up to the point before sexual intercourse. Participants completed the narratives to verify whether they spontaneously included references to condom use, and these references were related to self-report of sexual protection (Study 2). Finally, a recognition memory test clarified the typicality of condom use actions in the sexual script-based narratives (Study 3).