Using the Web to run behavioural and social experiments quickly and efficiently has become increasingly popular in recent years, but there is some controversy about the suitability of using the Web ...for these objectives. Several studies have analysed the accuracy and precision of different web technologies in order to determine their limitations. This paper updates the extant evidence about presentation accuracy and precision of the Web and extends the study of the accuracy and precision in the presentation of multimedia stimuli to HTML5-based solutions, which were previously untested. The accuracy and precision in the presentation of visual content in classic web technologies is acceptable for use in online experiments, although some results suggest that these technologies should be used with caution in certain circumstances. Declarative animations based on CSS are the best alternative when animation intervals are above 50 milliseconds. The performance of procedural web technologies based on the HTML5 standard is similar to that of previous web technologies. These technologies are being progressively adopted by the scientific community and have promising futures, which makes their use advisable to utilizing more obsolete technologies.
Studies of unconscious mental processes often compare a performance measure (e.g., some assessment of perception or memory) with a measure of awareness (e.g., a verbal report or forced-choice ...response) of the critical cue or contingency taken either concurrently or separately. The resulting patterns of bivariate data across participants lend themselves to several analytic approaches for inferring the existence of unconscious mental processes, but it is rare for researchers to consider the underlying generative processes that might cause these patterns. We show that bivariate data are generally insufficient to discriminate single-process models, with a unitary latent process determining both performance and awareness, from dual-process models, comprising distinct latent processes for performance and awareness. Future research attempting to isolate and investigate unconscious processes will need to employ richer types of data and analyses.
In studies on probabilistic cuing of visual search, participants search for a target among several distractors and report some feature of the target. In a
biased stage
the target appears more ...frequently in one specific area of the search display. Eventually, participants become faster at finding the target in that rich region compared to the sparse region. In some experiments, this stage is followed by an
unbiased stage
, where the target is evenly located across all regions of the display. Despite this change in the spatial distribution of targets, search speed usually remains faster when the target is located in the previously rich region. The persistence of the bias even when it is no longer advantageous has been taken as evidence that this phenomenon is an attentional habit. The aim of this meta-analysis was to test whether the magnitude of probabilistic cuing decreases from the biased to the unbiased stage. A meta-analysis of 42 studies confirmed that probabilistic cuing during the unbiased stage was roughly half the size of cuing during the biased stage, and this decrease persisted even after correcting for publication bias. Thus, the evidence supporting the claim that probabilistic cuing is an attentional habit might not be as compelling as previously thought.
Overestimations of null contingencies between a cue, C, and an outcome, O, are widely reported effects that can arise for multiple reasons. For instance, a high probability of the cue,
P
(C), and a ...high probability of the outcome,
P
(O), are conditions that promote such overestimations. In two experiments, participants were asked to judge the contingency between a cue and an outcome. Both
P
(C) and
P
(O) were given extreme values (high and low) in a factorial design, while maintaining the contingency between the two events at zero. While we were able to observe main effects of the probability of each event, our experiments showed that the cue- and outcome-density biases interacted such that a high probability of the two stimuli enhanced the overestimation beyond the effects observed when only one of the two events was frequent. This evidence can be used to better understand certain societal issues, such as belief in pseudoscience, that can be the result of overestimations of null contingencies in high-
P
(C) or high-
P
(O) situations.
Abstract
Background
Despite major progress in global vaccination coverage, immunization rates are falling, resulting in outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. This study analyses content and ...source of the most popular tweets related to a recent case in Spain where an unvaccinated child contracted and later died from diphtheria. Understanding the characteristics of these tweets in the context of vaccination could inform efforts by health promotion professionals to increase their reach and impact.
Methods
We extracted tweets containing keywords related to the diphtheria case (from 1 May to 15 July 2015). We explored the prevalence of terms relating to policy and misinformation and manually coded the 194 most popular tweets (retweeted 100 or more times) with regard to source, topic, tone and sentiment.
Results
A total of 722 974 tweets were collected. Prevalence of terms relating to policy and misinformation increased at the onset of the case and after the death of the child. Popular tweets (194) were either pro-vaccination (58%) or neutral, with none classified as anti-vaccination. Popular topics included criticism towards anti-vaccination groups (35%) and effectiveness of immunization (22%). Popular tweets were informative (47%) or opinions (53%), which mainly expressed frustration (24%) or humour/sarcasm (23%). Popular Twitter accounts were newspaper and TV channels (15%), as well as individual journalists and authors of popular science (13.4%).
Conclusions
Healthcare organizations could collaborate with popular journalists or news outlets and employ authors of popular science to disseminate health information on social media, while addressing public concerns and misinformation in accessible ways.
Background
We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions ...developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each of the learning trials. The reduction of causal judgments appeared to be influenced by differences in the frequency with which the participants decided to apply the potential cause, hence indicating that the intervention affected their information sampling strategies.
Objective
In the present study, we investigated whether one of these interventions also reduces causal illusions when covariation information is acquired passively.
Method
Forty-one psychology undergraduates received our debiasing intervention, while 31 students were assigned to a control condition. All participants completed a passive contingency learning task.
Results
We found weaker causal illusions in students that participated in the debiasing intervention, compared to the control group.
Conclusion
The intervention affects not only the way the participants look for new evidence, but also the way they interpret given information.
Teaching implications
Our data extending previous results regarding evidence-based educational interventions aimed to promote critical thinking to situations in which we act as mere observers.
Summary
Cognitive bias modification (CBM), which retrains implicit biases towards unhealthy foods, has been proposed as a promising adjunct to improve the efficacy of weight loss interventions. We ...conducted a systematic review of research on three CBM approaches (i.e., cue‐specific inhibitory control, approach bias modification, and attentional bias modification) for reducing unhealthy eating biases and behavior. We performed a p‐curve analysis to determine the evidential value of this research; this method is optimally suited to clarify whether published results reflect true effects or false positives due to publication and reporting biases. When considering all CBM approaches, our results suggested that the findings of CBM trials targeting unhealthy eating are unlikely to be false positives. However, only research on attentional bias modification reached acceptable levels of power. These results suggest that CBM interventions may be an effective strategy to enhance the efficacy of weight loss interventions. However, there is room for improvement in the methodological standards of this area of research, especially increasing the statistical power can help to fully clarify the clinical potential of CBM, and determine the role of potential moderators.
Illusion of Control Yarritu, Ion; Matute, Helena; Vadillo, Miguel A.
Experimental psychology,
01/2014, Letnik:
61, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The illusion of control consists of overestimating the influence that our
behavior exerts over uncontrollable outcomes. Available evidence suggests that
an important factor in development of this ...illusion is the personal involvement
of participants who are trying to obtain the outcome. The dominant view assumes
that this is due to social motivations and self-esteem protection. We propose
that this may be due to a bias in contingency detection which occurs when the
probability of the action (i.e., of the potential cause) is high. Indeed,
personal involvement might have been often confounded with the probability of
acting, as participants who are more involved tend to act more frequently than
those for whom the outcome is irrelevant and therefore become mere observers. We
tested these two variables separately. In two experiments, the outcome was
always uncontrollable and we used a yoked design in which the participants of
one condition were actively involved in obtaining it and the participants in the
other condition observed the adventitious cause-effect pairs. The results
support the latter approach: Those acting more often to obtain the outcome
developed stronger illusions, and so did their yoked counterparts.
According to a popular model of self-control, willpower depends on a limited resource that can be depleted when we perform a task demanding self-control. This theory has been put to the test in ...hundreds of experiments showing that completing a task that demands high self-control usually hinders performance in any secondary task that subsequently taxes self-control. Over the last 5 years, the reliability of the empirical evidence supporting this model has been questioned. In the present study, we reanalysed data from a large-scale study—Many Labs 3—to test whether performing a depleting task has any effect on a secondary task that also relies on self-control. Although we used a large sample of more than 2000 participants for our analyses, we did not find any significant evidence of ego depletion: persistence on an anagram-solving task (a typical measure of self-control) was not affected by previous completion of a Stroop task (a typical depleting task in this literature). Our results suggest that either ego depletion is not a real effect or, alternatively, persistence in anagram solving may not be an optimal measure to test it.
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