A Game of Covid: Strategic Thoughts About a Ludified Pandemic.

Many aspects of handling the COVID-19 pandemic bear a resemblance to patterns found in games. We observe point displays and leader boards, the visible assumption of roles, classic archetypes, the collection of resources, and spatial awareness. We argue that these patterns manifest spontaneously as a form of analogical reasoning, because people lack cultural and individual norms as well as cognitive scripts for a pandemic.

The Power of Shape: How Shape of Node-Link Diagrams Impacts Aesthetic Appreciation and Triggers Interest.

Positive effects of aesthetically appreciated designs have long been studied and confirmed since the 19th century: such designs are more enjoyable, they are more forgivable for glitches and can increase users' performance. In the field of information visualization, studies of aesthetics are still a niche approach. In the current study, we aim to specifically understand which parameters in a visualization of node-link diagrams make them aesthetically pleasing-an important extension to already existing research on usability and readability aspects.

Back to the USSR: How Colors Might Shape the Political Perception of East versus West.

People typically process information to confirm their prior held attitudes and stereotypes. As the political relations between NATO and Russia have distinctively drifted apart in recent years, we were interested in how far old-established color depictions referring to the Cold War's demarcations (USSR = red; NATO = blue) might reinforce people's political perception of an East versus West antagonism nowadays. Participants received a fabricated news article in which both world powers were either depicted on a map as Russia = red and NATO = blue or vice versa (Study 1).

Semantic Stability is More Pleasurable in Unstable Episodic Contexts. On the Relevance of Perceptual Challenge in Art Appreciation.

Research in the field of psychological aesthetics points to the appeal of stimuli which defy easy recognition by being "semantically unstable" but which still allow for creating meaning-in the ongoing process of elaborative perception or as an end product of the entire process. Such effects were reported for hidden images (Muth and Carbon, 2013) as well as Cubist artworks concealing detectable-although fragmented-objects (Muth et al., 2013).

The stream of experience when watching artistic movies. Dynamic aesthetic effects revealed by the Continuous Evaluation Procedure (CEP).

Research in perception and appreciation is often focused on snapshots, stills of experience. Static approaches allow for multidimensional assessment, but are unable to catch the crucial dynamics of affective and perceptual processes; for instance, aesthetic phenomena such as the "Aesthetic-Aha" (the increase in liking after the sudden detection of Gestalt), effects of expectation, or Berlyne's idea that "disorientation" with a "promise of success" elicits interest. We conducted empirical studies on indeterminate artistic movies depicting the evolution and metamorphosis of Gestalt and investigated (i) the effects of sudden perceptual insights on liking; that is, "Aesthetic Aha"-effects, (ii) the dynamics of interest before moments of insight, and (iii) the dynamics of complexity before and after moments of insight.

The Sarrazin effect: the presence of absurd statements in conspiracy theories makes canonical information less plausible.

Reptile prime ministers and flying Nazi saucers-extreme and sometimes off-wall conclusion are typical ingredients of conspiracy theories. While individual differences are a common research topic concerning conspiracy theories, the role of extreme statements in the process of acquiring and passing on conspiratorial stories has not been regarded in an experimental design so far. We identified six morphological components of conspiracy theories empirically.

Thirty shades of truth: conspiracy theories as stories of individuation, not of pathological delusion.

Recent studies on conspiracy theories employ standardized questionnaires, thus neglecting their narrative qualities by reducing them to mere statements. Recipients are considered as consumers only. Two empirical studies-a conventional survey (n = 63) and a study using the method of narrative construction (n = 30)-which were recently conducted by the authors of this paper-suggest that the truth about conspiracy theories is more complex.