Publications by authors named "Vannia A Puig"

Article Synopsis
  • People often think about what might happen next in different situations, like driving in bad weather or going on a first date.
  • This kind of thinking, called simulation of the approximal future, is not very well understood yet.
  • Researchers found that these thoughts can be different from thinking about future events that aren't happening right now, and understanding this can help us learn more about how we perceive and remember things, and even how we deal with fears or mental health issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The deleterious effects of insufficient sleep have been well-established in the literature and can lead to a wide range of adverse health outcomes. Some of the most replicated findings demonstrate significant declines in cognitive functions such as vigilance and executive attention, psychomotor and cognitive speed, and working memory. Consequently, these decrements often lead individuals who are in a fatigued state to engage in substandard performance on everyday tasks.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Novel negative events are simulated in more event-specific detail than novel positive events. In the present study, we set out to assess whether this negative event detail bias is specific to simulations of personal events or whether evoking negative valence, in the context of simulations of personal and nonpersonal events, is sufficient for boosting simulated event detail. Participants simulated novel negative and positive events that might take place in their future, the future of an acquaintance, or the future of a familiar individual with whom they have not had prior contact.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the past decade, psychologists have devoted considerable attention to episodic simulation-the ability to imagine specific hypothetical events. Perhaps one of the most consistent patterns of data to emerge from this literature is that positive simulations of the future are rated as more detailed than negative simulations of the future, a pattern of results that is commonly interpreted as evidence for a positivity bias in future thinking. In the present article, we demonstrate across two experiments that negative future events are consistently simulated in more detail than positive future events when frequency of prior thinking is taken into account as a possible confounding variable and when level of detail associated with simulated events is assessed using an objective scoring criterion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF