New Research in Psychological Science

Fluctuations in Sustained Attention Explain Moment-to-Moment Shifts in Children’s Memory Formation
Alexandra Decker, Katherine Duncan, and Amy Finn

Why do children form exceptional memories only in select moments? Most prior work has pointed to children’s immature memory abilities as an answer, but here we explore the role of children’s frequent attentional lapses. We report the discovery that moment-to-moment fluctuations in attention between good and poor states causally influence whether children form memories in each moment and predict memory formation more in children than adults. Moreover, we find that children’s attention lapsed in time twice as often as adults’, and these lapses hurt memory more in children. Our work suggests that sustained attention acts like a gatekeeper, controlling what “gets in” to children’s long-term memory—and the gate to memory remains shut more often in children. These novel findings raise the possibility that differences in sustained attention may explain broad differences in cognitive performance and that to boost children’s learning we must first help them to effectively sustain attention. 

Reason Defaults: Presenting Defaults With Reasons for Choosing Each Option Helps Decision-Makers With Minority Interest
Shweta Desiraju and Berkeley Dietvorst

Choices with a default preselect an option that is chosen automatically unless a decision-maker selects an alternative and are often applied in consequential domains (e.g., organ donation, retirement savings). Defaults are effective at increasing people’s choice of the preselected option; however, they are often not designed to accommodate people who would benefit from an alternative option. This is because defaults typically opt all decision-makers into the option that is better for the majority of people, potentially at the expense of people whose interests are in the minority. In this article, we investigate a default intervention designed to encourage people with minority interests to opt out of a default while still guiding the majority of people to choose the default option. We find that this intervention may allow defaults to function in consequential domains while reducing the costs imposed on people with minority interests.  

The Gender-Equality Paradox in Chess Participation Is Partially Explained by the Generational-Shift Account but Fully Inconsistent With Existing Alternative Accounts: A Partial Concession and Reply to Napp and Breda (2023)
Allon Vishkin

Gender differences are frequently larger in countries with greater political and economic gender equality. The findings comprising this gender-equality paradox (GEP) are a cause for concern among educators and policymakers. A previous article (Vishkin, 2022) and an insightful commentary on it (Napp & Breda, 2023) agree that there is a GEP in chess participation, but they disagree regarding its underlying cause. I argued for a novel generational-shift account, according to which the GEP in chess is driven by the larger proportion of younger people in less gender-equal countries. Napp and Breda presented three arguments against this account. I concede their first point and provide new evidence inconsistent with their other points. I conclude that the GEP in chess participation is partially explained by the generational-shift account but is still entirely inconsistent with previous accounts of the GEP. 

The Gender-Equality Paradox in Chess Holds Among Young Players: A Commentary on the Vishkin (2022) Study
Clotilde Napp and Thomas Breda

More gender-equal and developed countries are expected to have lower gender differences in all domains. The gender-equality paradox is the fact that the opposite has been shown to hold true in some domains. A better understanding of this paradox is important for the understanding of gender differences and their origin. Vishkin (2022) shows that there is a gender-equality paradox in chess participation but that it appears to be an epiphenomenon since it is driven by the age structure of the players. He concludes from this result that a generational shift mechanism likely explains the cross-country pattern in chess. We show that there is a paradoxical cross-country relationship between female participation in chess and countries’ level of gender equality and development cannot be simply explained by the age structure of the players and requires other explanations.  

AI Hyperrealism: Why AI Faces Are Perceived as More Real Than Human Ones
Elizabeth Miller, Ben Steward, Zachary Witkower, Clare Sutherland, Eva Krumhuber, and Amy Dawel

Artificial intelligence, or AI, can now generate faces that are indistinguishable from human faces. However, AI algorithms tend to be trained using a disproportionate number of White faces. As a result, AI faces may appear especially realistic when they are White. Here, we show that White (but not non-White) AI faces are, remarkably, judged as human more often than pictures of actual humans. We pinpoint the perceptual qualities of faces that contribute to this hyperrealism phenomenon, including facial proportions, familiarity, and memorability. Problematically, the people who were most likely to be fooled by AI faces were the least likely to detect that they were being fooled. Our results explain why AI hyperrealism occurs and show that not all AI faces appear equally realistic, with implications for proliferating social bias and for public misidentification of AI. 

Vaccine Nationalism Counterintuitively Erodes Public Trust in Leaders
Clara Colombatto, Jim Everett, Julien Senn, Michel Maréchal, and M. J. Crockett  

A key factor in pandemic recovery is global access to medical resources. Yet rollout of supplies such as vaccines is characterized by stark inequities: In past and current pandemics, high-income nations have secured large quantities of doses beyond their needs, whereas low-income countries struggled to provide first doses. Scientific evidence suggests that these nationalistic policies have severe economic and virologic consequences, but politicians may hesitate to endorse redistribution for fear that prioritizing global concerns over domestic protection might lose them votes. We investigated adults’ trust in nationalistic versus redistributive leaders in the context of COVID-19 and the H5N1 influenza and show that citizens prefer redistributive leaders. A sample of civil servants, however, had the opposite intuition, predicting that the public would prefer nationalistic leaders. This discrepancy between public opinion and policymakers’ forecasts may result from experts overestimating the public’s self-interest, when in fact vaccine equity may be favorable even politically. 

Prototypes of People With Depression
Ignazio Ziano and Yasin Koc  

How do people imagine people with depression, and does this affect how laypeople understand depression symptoms? We asked U.S. American, British, and French adult participants and found that they had a multifaceted prototype of people with depression. Laypeople imagined people with depression with specific physical, social, and psychological features (unattractive, overweight, unsuccessful, introverted). People thought that if someone did not fit the prototype, the same symptoms (e.g., lack of sleep, continuous sad mood) were less indicative of depression, that they would experience less psychological pain, and that mental health care would be less appropriate for them. It was hard to correct these perceptions, and interventions yielded only small reductions of the effects of prototypes. These findings are important to show what people believe a people with depression should look like and how they would behave when someone who does not fit the prototype of the person with depression shows potential depression symptoms. 

Investigating Inattentional Blindness Through the Lens of Fear Chemosignals
Gün Semin, Michael DePhillips, and Nuno Gomes

Psychological scientists have documented the failure to notice unexpected objects or events when attention is focused elsewhere. This is known as inattentional blindness. We created a dynamic scenario that induced inattentional blindness. Participants were exposed to human odors (i.e., axillar sweat) produced while experiencing fear (fear odors) or in relaxed conditions. Fear odors have repeatedly been shown to enhance attentional sources and facilitate receivers’ sensory acquisition; this is not true for odors produced when relaxed. In our study, as predicted, participants saw unexpected stimuli significantly more often when they were exposed to fear odors than when they were exposed to odors produced when the donor was relaxed. Suppose the increase in detecting potentially unexpected events is about 10% with exposure to fear odors in real-life contexts, as in our study. This would substantially reduce the inattentional-blindness handicap, preventing errors that might otherwise lead to loss of human life or property damage. This research has a broad range of significant practical implications for individuals engaged in tasks requiring high levels of sustained vigilance. 

Generating New Musical Preferences From Multi-Level Mapping of Predictions to Reward
Nicholas Kathios, Matthew Sachs, Euan Zhang, Yongtian Ou, and Psyche Loui

All known societies appear to enjoy listening to music, yet there is still scientific debate as to what makes music so pleasurable and what function it might serve. One prominent theory is that music co-opts our inclination to try to predict events in the future, and we find the ability to form successful predictions to be rewarding. The relationship between learning to predict in music and reward has been difficult to prove, however, because we typically learn the patterns of most music we encounter early in life. Here, we overcome this limitation by evaluating how preferences develop over time to music composed in a completely unfamiliar musical system. Across nine studies, we show that listeners from two different cultures (the United States and China) can rapidly learn this novel musical system from repeated exposure and quickly come to prefer melodies for which they can successfully predict how they will end. We find that this learning is tied to the activity and functional connectivity of the auditory and reward systems of the brain and influenced by individual differences in reward sensitivity to music. Collectively, the results offer a possible mechanism by which music can become rewarding.   

Reducing Reliance on Facial Stereotypes in Consequential Social Judgments: Intervention Success With White Male Faces
Youngki Hong, Kao-Wei Chua, and Jonathan Freeman

People spontaneously form initial impressions of others based solely on their facial appearance. These impressions, although often inaccurate, can lead to consequential social judgments, including life-or-death decisions like criminal sentencing. The prevailing view is that such biases stem from evolutionarily based approach-avoidance behavior, suggesting that they might be rigid and difficult to change. However, an associative learning paradigm, designed to sever the stereotypical links between specific facial appearances and perceived trustworthiness, was effective in reducing the reliance on facial appearance in social impressions and legal-sentencing decisions involving White male faces. This research highlights the promise of interventions that seek to mitigate the harmful effects of facial stereotypes on consequential social settings by dismantling the automatic associations between facial features and personality traits. 

Experienced Love: An Empirical Account
Saurabh Bhargava

Although artists, philosophers, and psychologists have asserted the centrality of love for relationships, well-being, and longevity, scholars have yet to produce a comprehensive empirical account of how men and women experience love. This investigation—leveraging high-frequency data from mobile-phone diaries on the time use, emotion, and well-being of several thousand U.S. adults—aspires toward such an account. In contrast to popular proclamations, this article documents striking similarities across gender in the experience of love, including the overall prevalence of partner love, the elevation of love in the early stages of relationships and after prolonged same-day partner separations, and substantial increases in well-being in love’s presence. However, men reported less child love and sustained less severe declines in partner love across marital cohorts than women. Across similarities and differences, the findings allude to an adaptive, universal, and highly functional emotion that may play a central role in relationship formation and sustenance. 

Personal Misconduct Elicits Harsher Professional Consequences for Artists (vs. Scientists): A Moral-Decoupling Process
Joseph Siev and Jacob Teeny

Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have raised public awareness about sexual, racial, and other forms of personal misconduct, and perpetrators have increasingly been held accountable—but not always equally. Here, we show how differences in people’s professional work (i.e., whether it is perceived as more artistic or more scientific) affect how they are professionally punished for their personal misbehavior, leading to harsher consequences for those whose work is viewed as more art than science (vs. more science than art). This emerges in records of academic sanctions against university faculty for sexual misconduct and across several careful experiments. The effect occurs because people find it harder to separate artistic work from artists’ morality compared to the seemingly more impersonal work of scientists. These findings have direct relevance for understanding both the public’s reactions to personal misconduct (e.g., boycotting, deplatforming) and the professional consequences of such personal misconduct (e.g., losing awards, being fired) as a function of offenders’ professional roles and fields. 

Identity Concealment May Discourage Health-Seeking Behaviors: Evidence From Sexual Minority Men During the 2022 Global Mpox Outbreak
Joel Le Forestier, Elizabeth Page-Gould, and Alison Chasteen

Sexual minorities, and members of many other stigmatized groups, face considerable health disparities. This research focuses on one factor that might contribute to these disparities: identity concealment. We collected data from sexual-minority men during the 2022 global mpox outbreak to test whether men who concealed their sexual orientations would be less likely to seek out mpox-related health resources such as vaccines. We found that they were, and we found tentative evidence that one reason might be that they were less connected to their sexual-orientation communities, to whom the resources were targeted, and thus less likely to know about the resources. Concealment may thus be related to worse health because concealment makes it harder for people to access health resources that might otherwise improve or sustain their health. 

Attitudes and Laws About Abortion Are Linked to Extrinsic Mortality Risk: A Life History Perspective on Variability in Reproductive Rights
Elena Brandt and Jon Maner

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, public opinion and laws regarding abortion have taken center stage in the American sociopolitical landscape. Rather than an issue specific to U.S. politics, however, reproductive norms are an essential social issue worldwide, and the debate about the acceptability of abortion appears universal. This article incorporates the evolutionary perspective of life-history theory to look at abortion—especially in younger women—as an adaptive means of prioritizing long-term development over immediate reproduction, a pattern established in other animal species as a feature of stable ecologies with low mortality risk. Social norms, beliefs, and laws about abortions may serve as cultural tools people use to regulate reproductive behavior in response to local mortality risk. Supporting this perspective, global, local, and individual data from multiple sources suggest that lower levels of extrinsic mortality risk are associated with more permissive laws and attitudes toward abortion.  

Improving Memory Search Through Model-Based Cue Selection
Charlotte Cornell, Kenneth Norman, Thomas Griffiths, and Qiong Zhang

People often use information from their environment when they need help remembering things. Here, we sought to develop an automated way of generating useful reminders when memory search gets stuck. To do this, we built a computational model of memory search that predicted the effectiveness of specific cues, and we integrated it into our live experiment. Our model was able to successfully select cues that were more (vs. less) helpful by predicting how memories would be organized into a “memory space” and then choosing cues that activated parts of this space containing not-yet-retrieved memories. These results provide new insights into how to restart memory when recall fails, and they provide a theoretical foundation for future systems that enhance human performance by selecting effective retrieval cues.

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