Continued influence of false accusations in forming impressions of political candidates.

Previous work has shown that false information affects decision-making even after being corrected, a phenomenon known as "continued influence effects" (CIEs). Using mock social media posts about fictional political candidates, we observe robust within-participant CIEs: candidates targeted by corrected accusations are rated more poorly than candidates not targeted by allegations. These effects occur both immediately and after as much as a 2-day delay.

Metacognition bridges experiences and beliefs in sense of agency.

Cognitive scientists differentiate the "minimal self" - subjective experiences of agency and ownership in our sensorimotor interactions with the world - from declarative beliefs about the self that are sustained over time. However, it remains an open question how individual sensory experiences of agency are integrated into the belief ofbeing an agent.We administered a sensorimotor task to measure subjects' (n = 195) propensity to classify stimuli as self-caused and metacognitive monitoring of such judgements, and we compared these behavioral metrics to declarative beliefs about their agency.

Visual free recall and recognition in art students and laypeople.

Artists and laypeople differ in their ability to create drawings. Previous research has shown that artists have improved memory performance during drawing; however, it is unclear whether they have better visual memory after the drawing is finished. In this paper, we focused on the question of differences in visual memory between art students and the general population in two studies.

Intersubject correlations in reward and mentalizing brain circuits separately predict persuasiveness of two types of ISIS video propaganda.

The Islamist group ISIS has been particularly successful at recruiting Westerners as terrorists. A hypothesized explanation is their simultaneous use of two types of propaganda: Heroic narratives, emphasizing individual glory, alongside Social narratives, which emphasize oppression against Islamic communities. In the current study, functional MRI was used to measure brain responses to short ISIS propaganda videos distributed online.

Assessing the impact of attention fluctuations on statistical learning.

Attention fluctuates between optimal and suboptimal states. However, whether these fluctuations affect how we learn visual regularities remains untested. Using web-based real-time triggering, we investigated the impact of sustained attentional state on statistical learning using online and offline measures of learning.

Item memorability has no influence on value-based decisions.

While making decisions, we often rely on past experiences to guide our choices. However, not all experiences are remembered equally well, and some elements of an experience are more memorable than others. Thus, the intrinsic memorability of past experiences may bias our decisions.

Impact of stereotype threat on brain activity during memory tasks in older adults.

We report the first neuroimaging experiment to investigate the impact of explicitly activating aging stereotypes (i.e., stereotype threat) on brain activity during cognitive tasks.

Associations of polygenic risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with general and specific dimensions of childhood psychological problems and facets of impulsivity.

A polygenic risk score (PRS) for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been found to be associated with ADHD in multiple studies, but also with many other dimensions of problems. Little is known, however, about the processes underlying these transdiagnostic associations. Using data from the baseline and 1-year follow-up assessments of 9- to 10-year-old children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development™ (ABCD©) Study, associations were assessed between an ADHD PRS and both general and specific factors of psychological problems defined in bifactor modeling.

Propofol selectively modulates functional connectivity signatures of sustained attention during rest and narrative listening.

Sustained attention is a critical cognitive function reflected in an individual's whole-brain pattern of functional magnetic resonance imaging functional connectivity. However, sustained attention is not a purely static trait. Rather, attention waxes and wanes over time.

A tutorial on capturing mental representations through drawing and crowd-sourced scoring.

When we draw, we are depicting a rich mental representation reflecting a memory, percept, schema, imagination, or feeling. In spite of the abundance of data created by drawings, drawings are rarely used as an output measure in the field of psychology, due to concerns about their large variance and their difficulty of quantification. However, recent work leveraging pen-tracking, computer vision, and online crowd-sourcing has revealed new ways to capture and objectively quantify drawings, to answer a wide range of questions across fields of psychology.

Medical students' empathy positively predicts charitable donation behavior.

Empathy is known to motivate prosocial behavior. This relationship, however is complex and influenced by the social context and the type of prosocial behavior. Additionally, empathy is a complex psychological capacity, making it important to examine how different components of empathy influence different prosocial behaviors.

Me first: Neural representations of fairness during three-party interactions.

One hallmark of human morality is a deep sense of fairness. People are motivated by both self-interest and a concern for the welfare of others. However, it remains unclear whether these motivations rely on similar neural computations, and the extent to which such computations influence social decision-making when self-fairness and other-fairness motivations compete.

The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example.

Cortical mechanisms of talker normalization in fluent sentences.

Adjusting to the vocal characteristics of a new talker is important for speech recognition. Previous research has indicated that adjusting to talker differences is an active cognitive process that depends on attention and working memory (WM). These studies have not examined how talker variability affects perception and neural responses in fluent speech.

Manual directional gestures facilitate cross-modal perceptual learning.

Action and perception interact in complex ways to shape how we learn. In the context of language acquisition, for example, hand gestures can facilitate learning novel sound-to-meaning mappings that are critical to successfully understanding a second language. However, the mechanisms by which motor and visual information influence auditory learning are still unclear.

The social neuroscience of race-based and status-based prejudice.

The largely independent neuroscience literatures on race and status show increasingly that both constructs shape how we evaluate others. Following an overview and comparison of both literatures, we suggest that apparent differences in the brain regions supporting race-based and status-based evaluations may tap into distinct components of a common evaluative network. For example, perceiver motivations and/or category cues (e.

Hearing sounds as words: Neural responses to environmental sounds in the context of fluent speech.

Environmental sounds (ES) can be understood easily when substituted for words in sentences, suggesting that linguistic context benefits may be mediated by processes more general than some language-specific theories assert. However, the underlying neural processing is not understood. EEG was recorded for spoken sentences ending in either a spoken word or a corresponding ES.

A thought in the park: The influence of naturalness and low-level visual features on expressed thoughts.

Prior research has shown that the physical characteristics of one's environment have wide ranging effects on affect and cognition. Other research has demonstrated that one's thoughts have impacts on mood and behavior, and in this three-part research program we investigated how physical features of the environment can alter thought content. In one study, we analyzed thousands of journal entries written by park visitors to examine how low-level and semantic visual features of the parks correlate with different thought topics.

Using a foreign language reduces mental imagery.

Mental imagery plays a significant role in guiding how we feel, think, and even behave. These mental simulations are often guided by language, making it important to understand what aspects of language contribute to imagery vividness and consequently to the way we think. Here, we focus on the native-ness of language and present evidence that using a foreign language leads to less vivid mental imagery than using a native tongue.

Understanding environmental sounds in sentence context.

There is debate about how individuals use context to successfully predict and recognize words. One view argues that context supports neural predictions that make use of the speech motor system, whereas other views argue for a sensory or conceptual level of prediction. While environmental sounds can convey clear referential meaning, they are not linguistic signals, and are thus neither produced with the vocal tract nor typically encountered in sentence context.

How preschoolers and adults represent their joint action partner's behavior.

We investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying turn-taking joint action in 42-month-old children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) using a behavioral task of dressing a virtual bear together. We aimed to investigate how participants represent a partners' behavior, i.e.

Confident failures: Lapses of working memory reveal a metacognitive blind spot.

Working memory performance fluctuates dramatically from trial to trial. On many trials, performance is no better than chance. Here, we assessed participants' awareness of working memory failures.

The suppression of scale-free fMRI brain dynamics across three different sources of effort: aging, task novelty and task difficulty.

There is growing evidence that fluctuations in brain activity may exhibit scale-free ("fractal") dynamics. Scale-free signals follow a spectral-power curve of the form P(f ) ∝ f(-β), where spectral power decreases in a power-law fashion with increasing frequency. In this study, we demonstrated that fractal scaling of BOLD fMRI signal is consistently suppressed for different sources of cognitive effort.

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation.

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name or produce an isolated musical note without the aid of a reference note. One skill thought to be unique to AP possessors is the ability to provide absolute intonation judgments (e.g.

Gesture as a window onto children's number knowledge.

Before learning the cardinal principle (knowing that the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of the whole set), children do not use number words accurately to label most set sizes. However, it remains unclear whether this difficulty reflects a general inability to conceptualize and communicate about number, or a specific problem with number words. We hypothesized that children's gestures might reflect knowledge of number concepts that they cannot yet express in speech, particularly for numbers they do not use accurately in speech (numbers above their knower-level).