Reliable Web-Based Auditory Cognitive Testing: Observational Study.

Background: Web-based experimentation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has enabled large-scale participant recruitment and data collection. Auditory testing on the web has shown promise but faces challenges such as uncontrolled environments and verifying headphone use. Prior studies have successfully replicated auditory experiments but often involved younger participants, limiting the generalizability to older adults with varying hearing abilities.

Exploring the hierarchical structure of human plans via program generation.

Human behavior is often assumed to be hierarchically structured, made up of abstract actions that can be decomposed into concrete actions. However, behavior is typically measured as a sequence of actions, which makes it difficult to infer its hierarchical structure. In this paper, we explore how people form hierarchically structured plans, using an experimental paradigm with observable hierarchical representations: participants create programs that produce sequences of actions in a language with explicit hierarchical structure.

Costly exploration produces stereotypes with dimensions of warmth and competence.

Traditional explanations for stereotypes assume that they result from deficits in humans (ingroup-favoring motives, cognitive biases) or their environments (majority advantages, real group differences). An alternative explanation recently proposed that stereotypes can emerge when exploration is costly. Even optimal decision makers in an ideal environment can inadvertently form incorrect impressions from arbitrary encounters.