While watching someone kicking a ball, missing moments of ball contact can be incorrectly identified as seen if the event is continued in a causal manner (i.e., the ball flying off).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of objects in space. Shepard and Metzler's shape-matching tasks, frequently used to test mental rotation, involve presenting pictorial representations of 3D objects. This stimulus material has raised questions regarding the ecological validity of the test for mental rotation with actual visual 3D objects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe existence of transfer effects of video games on cognitive performance are controversially discussed in experimental psychology. Whereas recent meta-analyses suggest the absence of far transfer effects, empirical evidence regarding near transfer effects is more controversial. This conceptual replication investigated the short-term near transfer effect of playing Tetris on mental rotation abilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe plot of a narrative is represented in the form of event models in working memory. Because only parts of the plot are actually presented and information is continually changing, comprehenders have to infer a good portion of a narrative and keep their mental representation updated. Research has identified two related processes (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2023
Metacognition, our ability to reflect on our own beliefs, manifests itself in the confidence we have in these beliefs, and helps us guide our behavior in complex and uncertain environments. Here, we provide empirical tests of the importance of metacognition during the pandemic. Bayesian and frequentist analyses demonstrate that citizens with higher metacognitive sensitivity-where confidence differentiates correct from incorrect COVID-19 beliefs-reported higher willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19, and higher compliance with recommended public health measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOnline phenomena like echo chambers and polarization are believed to be driven by humans' penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behavior, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behavior changes when people are given an opportunity to reply to dissenters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this study, we investigated the nature of long-term memory representations for naturalistic audio-visual scenes. Whereas previous research has shown that audio-visual scenes are recognized more accurately than their unimodal counterparts, it remains unclear whether this benefit stems from audio-visually integrated long-term memory representations or a summation of independent retrieval cues. We tested two predictions for audio-visually integrated memory representations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA substantial literature shows that public polarization over climate change in the U.S. is most pronounced among the science literate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging-event information (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman observers (comprehenders) segment dynamic information into discrete events. That is, although there is continuous sensory information, comprehenders perceive boundaries between two meaningful units of information. In narrative comprehension, comprehenders use linguistic, non-linguistic , and physical cues for this event boundary perception.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Res Princ Implic
January 2019
The comprehension of dynamic naturalistic events poses at least two challenges to the cognitive system: filtering relevant information with attention and dealing with information that was missing or missed. With four experiments, we studied the completion of missing information despite full attention. Participants watched short soccer video clips and we informed participants that we removed a critical moment of ball contact in half of the clips.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
February 2018
Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between 2 events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
July 2017
Object-based attention influences the subjective metrics of surrounding space. However, does perceived space influence object-based attention, as well? We used an attentive tracking task that required sustained object-based attention while objects moved within a tracking space. We manipulated perceived space through the availability of depth cues and varied the orientation of the tracking space.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
July 2017
Human observers are capable of tracking multiple objects among identical distractors based only on their spatiotemporal information. Since the first report of this ability in the seminal work of Pylyshyn and Storm (1988, Spatial Vision, 3, 179-197), multiple object tracking has attracted many researchers. A reason for this is that it is commonly argued that the attentional processes studied with the multiple object paradigm apparently match the attentional processing during real-world tasks such as driving or team sports.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttitudes and motivations have been shown to affect the processing of visual input, indicating that observers may see a given situation each literally in a different way. Yet, in real-life, processing information in an unbiased manner is considered to be of high adaptive value. Attitudinal and motivational effects were found for attention, characterization, categorization, and memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn everyday life, when observing activities taking place in our environment, we often shift our attention among several activities and therefore perceive each activity sequence piecemeal with temporal gaps in between. Two studies examined whether the length of these gaps influences the processing of the observed activities. Experiment 1 presented film clips depicting activities that were interrupted by either short or long gaps and asked participants to estimate how long the target action presented at the end of the clip would normally take if it were to take place in reality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Res Princ Implic
September 2016
Humans often falsely report having seen a causal link between two dynamic scenes if the second scene depicts a valid logical consequence of the initial scene. As an example, a video clip shows someone kicking a ball including the ball flying. Even if the video clip omitted the moment of contact (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
October 2016
Multiple object tracking (MOT) plays a fundamental role in processing and interpreting dynamic environments. Regarding the type of information utilized by the observer, recent studies reported evidence for the use of object features in an automatic, low- level manner. By introducing a novel paradigm that allowed us to combine tracking with a noninterfering top-down task, we tested whether a voluntary component can regulate the deployment of attention to task-relevant features in a selective manner.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
June 2016
The dynamic environment of human observers requires continuous reallocations of visual attention to compensate for location changes of the attended objects. Particularly, situations with reduced spatial distance between targets and other objects in the display are crucial for keeping track of the target objects. In the present experiments, we explored how the temporal dynamics of such moments of reduced spacing affects the reallocation of visual attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman long-term memory for visual objects and scenes is tremendous. Here, we test how auditory information contributes to long-term memory performance for realistic scenes. In a total of six experiments, we manipulated the presentation modality (auditory, visual, audio-visual) as well as semantic congruency and temporal synchrony between auditory and visual information of brief filmic clips.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman observers are able to keep track of several independently moving objects among other objects. Within theories of multiple object tracking (MOT), distractors are assumed to influence tracking performance only by their distance toward the next target. In order to test this assumption, we designed a variant of the MOT paradigm that involved spatially arranged target-distractor pairs and sudden displacements of distractors during a brief flash.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
June 2015
Does event perception alter perceived duration? Previous research has shown that the perceived duration of a short scene depicting a disk moving along a segmented path is reduced when the temporal order of the motion segments is reversed (Memento effect). This effect has been attributed to the idea that reversed segments give rise to the perception of distinct visual events, whereas continuous segments are perceived as a single event. It has been suggested that the reduction in perceived duration is a result of perceiving multiple distinct events rather than 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
September 2014
Humans understand text and film by mentally representing their contents in situation models. These describe situations using dimensions like time, location, protagonist, and action. Changes in 1 or more dimensions (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
April 2014
Objects are not represented individually in visual working memory (VWM), but in relation to the contextual information provided by other memorized objects. We studied whether the contextual information provided by the spatial configuration of all memorized objects is viewpoint-dependent. We ran two experiments asking participants to detect changes in locations between memory and probe for one object highlighted in the probe image.
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