Essays
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Implicit Memory - McBride, Dawn M.
Implicit memory involves the influence of memory without intention and often without awareness. For example, many of the tasks we perform without conscious control are considered implicit tasks. These include tasks with which we have experience such as riding a bicycle, driving a car, or typing. In this essay, the study of implicit memory is briefly reviewed beginning with discussion of foundational studies in this area that followed either a processing or memory systems perspective on this topic. Some current, cutting edge research is reviewed with primary emphasis on questions that hold promise for new knowledge about implicit forms of memory: (i) In what ways is conceptual implicit memory (memory without intention) similar to explicit memory (memory with intention)? (ii) What roles do item‐specific (focus on details of an item) and relational (focus on connections between items) processing play in implicit memory retrieval? (iii) What is the role of attention in implicit memory retrieval? Examination of these questions provides avenues for future research in this area. -
Event Processing as an Executive Enterprise - Ross, Robbie A.
Actual experience as life unfolds tends to be an ebb and flow of dynamic, multimodal sensations, many of which are fleeting. Yet what is encoded, recalled, and talked about tends to be events—units of experience that are conceptualized as having both a beginning and an end. In this essay, we consider processing mechanisms that enable the extraction of event structure from the dynamically unfolding stream of experience. Two proposals emerge from our own and others' recent research on event processing: First, fluent detection of structure within activity streams appears to hinge on knowledge of the predictability relations within those streams. Second, skill at event processing seems to involve harnessing such knowledge of predictability relations to selectively direct attention to information‐rich portions of the activity stream. If this account is correct, individual differences in knowledge and executive skill should influence event‐processing fluency. As well, children's developmental progress in event processing should reveal the telltale impact of increasing knowledge and executive skill. Our hope is that research pursuing these ideas will ultimately make it possible to enhance event‐processing fluency for all, which in turn has the potential to facilitate memory, learning, and social interaction. -
Implicit Attitude Measures - Mitchell, Gregory
Owing to concerns about the willingness and ability of people to report their attitudes accurately in response to direct inquiries, psychologists have developed a number of unobtrusive, or implicit, measures of attitudes. The most popular contemporary implicit measures equate spontaneous responses to stimuli with attitudes about those stimuli. Although these measures have been used to open important new lines of inquiry, they suffer from reliability and construct validity problems and administration limitations. Researchers conducting basic research on attitudes may fruitfully utilize implicit measures as part of a multipronged measurement strategy, but researchers seeking to predict behavior from attitudes should continue to rely on explicit measures of attitudes, taking care to minimize reactive bias and to formulate the attitude questions at the same level of specificity as the behavior to be predicted. -
Understanding Biological Motion - van Boxtel, Jeroen J. A.
The ultimate goal of biological motion perception is to be able to understand actions so as to provide an answer to the question, “Who did what to whom and why?” This inference capacity enables humans to go beyond the surface appearance of behavior in order to successfully interact with others and with the environment. In addition to its functional importance, understanding biological motion bridges several major fields, including perception, reasoning, and social cognition. However, despite its paramount role in human perception and cognition, only limited progress has so far been made in understanding biological motion. After reviewing the relevant literature, this essay argues that future research needs to identify the contributions of three basic processes involved in understanding biological motion: perception of animacy, causality, and intention. The involvement of these basic processes needs to be investigated both in the typical healthy population as well as in populations with mental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. We also suggest that a productive research approach should focus on more interactive actions of the sort often observed in the natural social environment, rather than solely using the single‐actor displays that have been typical in previous work. It is further emphasized that there is a need for a theoretical and computational framework within which these different types of processing can be united. We propose that the predictive coding framework provides a good candidate. -
Emotion Regulation - Zarolia, Paree
Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which we influence which emotions we have, when we have them, how we experience them, and how we express them. The study of emotion regulation has become an increasingly popular and fruitful area of research in the past few decades. In the following chapter, we summarize past research, highlight current findings, and suggest some potential future directions for the study of emotion regulation. We review foundational research highlighting the process model of emotion regulation and research comparing distinct emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal and suppression. Then, we highlight new conceptualizations of emotion regulation that question the assumption that emotion regulation is inherently adaptive, that examine the effect of culture on emotion regulation, examine the contexts that lead to successful emotion regulation towards a variety of emotion goals. Finally we discuss promising future directions for the study of emotion regulation. -
Cultural Differences in Emotions - De Leersnyder, Jozefien
Do emotions differ across cultures? This essay reviews the markedly different ways in which psychologists have approached this question in the past and discusses directions for the future. We first show how past research has often failed to find cultural differences in emotion by focusing on what emotions people from different cultures can have hypothetically, rather than investigating the emotions they actually have in daily life. Taking a sociocultural perspective, we demonstrate that cultural differences in people's actual emotional practices not only exist but are also meaningful and predictable: Accumulating evidence suggests that people experience more of those emotions that fit their culture's relationship goals and values. We review evidence for two mechanisms that may be behind these cultural differences in emotion—different situational ecologies and different tendencies to interpret (or appraise) emotional events. Finally, we discuss a road map for what lies ahead in the psychological study of cultural differences in emotion. We propose that future research will benefit from a dynamic approach to culture and emotion—an approach that explicitly captures how cultural differences in emotion emerge as a function of people's ongoing social interactions and relationships. -
Multitasking - Irwin, Matthew
Multitasking has become increasingly prevalent, especially as we continue to incorporate more and more new media technologies into our daily activities. This essay first identifies trends in the availability and use of media devices in daily life and multitasking behaviors related to such trends. Second, given the general consensus that multitasking impairs performance outcomes, recent multitasking trends call for greater research attention to the subject. We outline the historical perspectives on cognitive structures and processes related to a human's general ability to multitask, culminating with the more recent threaded cognition theory. Third, we present two new research directions on multitasking. One is the exploration of long‐term consequences of multitasking behaviors, such as their impacts on cognitive functions, and dynamic changes in individuals' needs and multitasking behavioral changes over time; the other is a cognitive dimensional framework for defining multitasking, which may offer a means to reconcile findings across various multitasking research paradigms, and also to guide designs of multitasking technologies and environments. Finally, looking to the future, we propose several ways to advance the research on multitasking. -
The Neurobiology and Physiology of Emotions: A Developmental Perspective - Kahle, Sarah S.
This essay discusses the physiological and neural activity associated with emotion processes, with a focus on the development of this activity in children. We review some conceptual issues about the distinctions between the components of emotion, including the physiology associated with emotions themselves, attempts to regulate emotions, and trait or state patterns of responding. Foundational work examining autonomic nervous system activity is summarized, and we highlight recent work that attempts to investigate emotion processes in multiple systems. We then suggest that two fruitful avenues of future research include the examination of the neurobiology and physiology of social emotions, and further investigation into the temporal dynamics of emotion processes. -
Setting One's Mind on Action: Planning Out Goal Striving in Advance - Gollwitzer, Peter M.
Ineffective goal striving may be overcome using a simple self‐regulation strategy: preparing goal striving in advance by forming implementation intentions (i.e., making if‐then plans). This strategy helps to cope with the classic challenges to goal striving: getting started, staying on track, not overextending oneself, and disengaging from faulty means. Interestingly, these beneficial effects are observed no matter whether hindrances from within (e.g., ego depletion) or outside (e.g., social influence) the person are to be dealt with. In this essay, the processes on which the beneficial effects of implementation intentions are based will be discussed by pointing to relevant research using cognitive task paradigms and assessing brain data. Moreover, recent findings are reported demonstrating that implementation intentions can be used to curb reflexive cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses that interfere with a person's focal goal pursuit. In closing this essay, a behavior change intervention (i.e., mental contrasting with implementation intentions) is introduced that establishes the prerequisites for implementation intention effects to occur, and research areas in psychology are pointed to that could benefit from conducting implementation intention research. -
Concepts and Semantic Memory - Malt, Barbara C.
Humans accumulate vast amounts of knowledge over the life span. Much work aimed at understanding this knowledge store has been called either concepts or semantic memory research. This essay reviews early research on the nature of concrete concepts (concepts of concrete objects) and their organization in memory. It then raises considerations of abstract and relational concepts and of how action affects representation and vice versa. Additional advances discussed come from statistically based views of semantics, connectionist modeling, and neuroscientific evidence, all showing how distributed sources of information can be integrated to create semantic or conceptual content. Cross‐cultural and cross‐linguistic evidence indicate, though, that models based on evidence from any one cultural or language group may not apply well to others. The essay concludes by arguing that key issues for future research include broadening the kinds of knowledge structures that are studied and clarifying how language and nonlinguistic representations are related. -
Against Game Theory - Lucas, Gale M.
People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at predicting behavior. But instead of abandoning classical game theory, those in the social sciences have mounted a rescue operation under the name of “behavioral game theory.” Its main tool is to propose systematic deviations from the predictions of game theory, deviations that arise from character type, for example. Other deviations purportedly come from cognitive overload or limitations. The fundamental idea of behavioral game theory is that, if we know the deviations, then we can correct our predictions accordingly, and so get it right. There are two problems with this rescue operation, each of them is fatal. (i) For a chooser, contemplating the range of possible deviations, as there are many dozens, actually makes it exponentially harder to figure out a path to an outcome. This makes the theoretical models useless for modeling human thought or human behavior in general. (ii) Modeling deviations are helpful only if the deviations are consistent, so that scientists (and indeed decision makers) can make predictions about future choices on the basis of past choices. But the deviations are not consistent. In general, deviations from classical models are not consistent for any individual from one task to the next or between individuals for the same task. In addition, people's beliefs are in general not consistent with their choices. Accordingly, all hope is hollow that we can construct a general behavioral game theory. What can replace it? We survey some of the emerging candidates. -
Neural and Cognitive Plasticity - Mercado III, Eduardo
Modern humans spend much of their early lives participating in formal educational programs designed to increase their cognitive competencies. Despite this concerted effort to maximize individuals intellectual capacities, scientists and educators know relatively little about the neural factors that determine when and how learning experiences lead to improvements in cognitive abilities. Current theories of how brains are changed by learning focus on incremental adjustments to connections between neurons that are driven by increases in neural activity. This article summarizes past theoretical and experimental research on the relationship between neural plasticity and experience‐dependent changes in cognition, briefly describes recent technological advances in measuring and inducing brain plasticity mechanisms, and outlines key questions that researchers must address to provide a more complete understanding of the factors that enable people to learn new cognitive skills. Answering such questions will require the combined efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, and educational researchers, as well as the development of new technologies for monitoring neural changes in humans and other animals as they learn to perform a variety of cognitive tasks. -
Holding On or Letting Go? Persistence and Disengagement in Goal Striving - Brandstätter, Veronika
Goals shape our personal identities, structure our everyday lives, regulate our behavior, and thus are in fact one of the most important sources of performance and well‐being. Successful goal striving unfolds between tenacious persistence on the one hand and timely disengagement on the other when a goal has become futile and too costly. Disengagement from goals is often difficult, however. Issues of unproductive persistence and (unsuccessful) goal disengagement have, for a long time, been addressed primarily in the realm of monetary decision‐making (escalation of commitment). In the more recent past, research on personal goals has devoted attention to issues of goal disengagement, doing so from two different research perspectives (individual differences approach, process‐oriented approach). This essay gives an overview of traditional and current research on goal disengagement with its practical implications for the individual but also on a societal level, and outlines promising lines of research addressing fundamental questions still unanswered. -
Neuroeconomics - Levy, Ifat
In recent years, researchers in economics, psychology, and neuroscience have joined forces in the study of decision‐making processes to form the new discipline of neuroeconomics. Neuroscientists turned to theories in economics and psychology to make sense of the increasing amounts of neurobiological data. At the same time, economists and psychologists turned to neuroscience for mechanistic constraints on their theories. Neuroeconomics studies tackle a host of topics, from financial choices through reinforcement learning to social decision making. Combining behavioral techniques with brain imaging in humans and electrophysiological recordings in animals, as well as complementary techniques, this interdisciplinary research has already generated new insights about the neural architecture of decision making. The neural mechanisms of some of the behavioral decision processes are increasingly understood, but many challenges remain. Extending neuroeconomics research to psychiatric disorders and incorporating new research tools are promising avenues for future studies. -
Language, Perspective, and Memory - Ryskin, Rachel A.
The ability to take the perspective of another person is ubiquitous in many everyday cognitive activities. In particular, it allows people to communicate efficiently with conversational partners. Speakers tailor what they say based on the listener's knowledge and, likewise, listeners use what they know about the speaker to better understand what the speaker means. In this essay, we review foundational research on the role of perspective‐taking in the domain of language processing and describe new lines of work that are beginning to explore the memory processes that support the efficient use of perspectives in conversation. We then discuss key avenues for future research, such as investigating whether the type of perspective‐taking involved in creating memory reminders draws on the same underlying cognitive processes as in the domain of language processing. Exploring this interface between language, perspective‐taking, and memory will require interdisciplinary crosstalk and integration of methodologies across the domains of memory and language research. -
Misinformation and How to Correct It - Cook, John
The increasing prevalence of misinformation in society may adversely affect democratic decision making, which depends on a well‐informed public. False information can originate from a number of sources including rumors, literary fiction, mainstream media, corporate‐vested interests, governments, and nongovernmental organizations. The rise of the Internet and user‐driven content has provided a venue for quick and broad dissemination of information, not all of which is accurate. Consequently, a large body of research spanning a number of disciplines has sought to understand misinformation and determine which interventions are most effective in reducing its influence. This essay summarizes research into misinformation, bringing together studies from psychology, political science, education, and computer science. -
Models of Duality - Krishna, Anand
Duality models generally assume that human psychology is based on two separate systems of information processing. These systems have specific characteristics that differentiate them from one another. Such models are increasingly common in social psychology today. A selection of duality models is discussed and categorized according to three factors: the type of mental representation used in the specified processes (experiential vs. nonexperiential), the methods of processing (associative vs. propositional), and the differing degree of automaticity (based on the aspects of efficiency, awareness, intentionality, and controllability) of the processes. In addition, models' statements about the superiority of one process over the other are enumerated. Foundational models of attribution, stereotyping, persuasion, and more general models are explained in an overview. Central aspects of these foundational models are extracted and applied in a discussion of current duality models in general social psychology, as well as newer dual‐process models of attitudes, moral judgments, and self‐regulation. Models positing a process superior in information processing are contrasted with models positing two processes with different specializations in information processing, and the implications of improved integration and specialization are discussed. -
Attitude: Construction versus Disposition - Lord, Charles G.
Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do, many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly, the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have, include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process. -
Coevolution of Decision‐Making and Social Environments - Bruch, Elizabeth
Social scientists have a longstanding theoretical interest in the relationship between individual behavior and social dynamics. A growing body of work demonstrates that, when human behavior is interdependent—that is, what one person does depends on the past, present, or anticipated future actions of others—there is not a simple or linear relationship between the choices of individuals and their collective consequences. Outside of the academy, policy makers are increasingly aware that well‐intentioned interventions can backfire if they fail to account for how people change their behavior in response to the intervention. This type of problem requires a systematic modeling approach. Our entry provides a brief introduction to a growing body of research that brings together two disparate literatures—studies of decision‐making and studies of the interplay between individuals' decisions and features of the social environment—through dynamic computational modeling. Cognitive scientists characterize human decision‐making under uncertainty using heuristics, rules‐of‐thumb that produce satisfactory choices quickly and with limited information. The heuristics we use and information samples we gather have profound consequences for the choices we make. At the same time, the social context defined by the choices of others feeds back to affect individual decision‐making. In recent years, there has been growing interest in methods such as agent‐based modeling and systems dynamics that can capture the dynamic interplay between individuals' choices and features of the environment. However, historically these approaches have not been grounded in cognitively plausible models of human behavior. We identify areas of high potential for future research, and lay out a preliminary framework to help guide understanding of the decision‐making process and its consequences in different social domains. -
Memory Gaps and Memory Errors - Neuschatz, Jeffrey S.
Memory is a reconstructive process, relying on pre‐existing shared knowledge to help us comprehend and interpret what we experience. A reliance on prior knowledge is a vital aid to communication and comprehension, but, as a consequence, results in the modification of some details in an event, the addition of other details, or even the fabrication of entire new events. We review classic research that first demonstrated the phenomenon of reconstructive memory and the capability of prior knowledge to influence what people remember. We next discuss cutting‐edge research involving memory gaps and memory errors, including autobiographical memories, distinguishing true from false memories, memory conformity, and potential adaptive reasons for memory errors. Finally, we point to directions for the future research. -
Attention and Perception - Rensink, Ronald A.
This essay discusses several key issues concerning the study of attention and its relation to visual perception, with an emphasis on behavioral and experiential aspects. It begins with an overview of several classical works carried out in the latter half of the twentieth century, such as the development of early filter and spotlight models of attention. This is followed by a survey of subsequent research that extended or modified these results in significant ways. It includes work on various forms of induced blindness and on the capabilities of nonattentional processes. It also covers proposals about how a “just‐in‐time” allocation of attention can create the impression that we see our surroundings in coherent detail everywhere, as well as how the failure of such allocation can result in various perceptual deficits. The final section examines issues that have not received much consideration to date, but that may be important for new lines of research in the near future. These include the prospects for a better characterization of attention, the possibility of more systematic computational explanations, factors that may significantly modulate attentional operation, and the possibility of several kinds of visual attention and visual experience. -
Regulatory Focus Theory - Higgins, E. Tory
Regulatory focus theory was the child of self‐discrepancy theory and the parent of regulatory fit theory. Self‐discrepancy theory distinguishes between self‐regulation in relation to hopes and aspirations (ideals) versus self‐regulation in relation to duties and obligations (oughts). It proposes that ideal versus ought self‐regulation are two different motivational systems for approaching pleasure and avoiding pain. In regulatory focus theory, promotion concerns with ideals (growth and advancement more generally) and prevention concerns with oughts (safety and security more generally) are motivational states that not only vary across individuals (personality) but also can be situationally induced. Regulatory focus theory proposes that the motivational state of being at “0” has negative valence in promotion (“0”as a nongain in relation to “+1”) but positive valence in prevention (“0” as a nonloss in relation to “−1”). Finally, giving rise to regulatory fit theory, regulatory focus theory distinguishes between the eager strategies that fit promotion and the vigilant strategies that fit prevention. Foundational research supporting each of these proposals is reviewed, and then more recent cutting‐edge research is described, including how this distinction is revealed in the behavior of nonhuman animals and how different tactics (e.g., risky vs conservative) can serve either promotion‐eagerness or prevention‐vigilance under different circumstances. Finally, I discuss two key issues for future research: whether promotion and prevention are competing motivations or can work together as partners, and whether there is support for the promotion–prevention distinction in everyday life beyond the laboratory. -
Knowledge Transfer - Nokes‐Malach, Timothy J.
Controversy regarding the nature and frequency of knowledge transfer has received significant attention for more than a century, and this debate has sparked advances in our theoretical understanding of transfer as well as educational practices designed to promote it. We review the classical cognitive approach to studying transfer and highlight several important critiques of that approach regarding issues of context, assessment, and individual differences. These critiques have pushed research to improve understanding of the learning processes that facilitate transfer, the application processes that enact it, and the measurement of it. Research investigating the relationship between achievement goals and transfer serves as an example of the ways issues of context and individual differences are being integrated into the study of transfer. Future work on transfer should continue to refine and clarify how we define, assess, and promote it. -
Language and Thought - Goldin‐Meadow, Susan
The notion that the language we speak impacts the thoughts we think is known as the Whorfian hypothesis. This hypothesis is typically tested by, first, describing two languages that differ systematically on a lexical or grammatical dimension and, second, comparing speakers of the two languages on a cognitive skill that might be expected to depend on that dimension. Whether or not we find support for the Whorfian hypothesis depends on how we define language, how we define thought, and what we take as evidence for “impact.” Another, more recent way of testing the hypothesis is to explore patterns of thought in human and nonhuman primates who do not have language––rather than compare cognition in speakers of language 1 versus language 2, we can compare cognition in individuals who have language versus those who do not. We can also explore whether language is special in the impact it has on thought by asking whether other conventional symbol systems shape cognition (e.g., does mental abacus affect thinking beyond numerical calculation? does map reading affect thinking about space more broadly?). If it turns out that the effect language has on thought is special, we need to determine which aspects of language make it special (e.g., do we need to explicitly recognize our behaviors as communicative in order for them to have an effect? do the gestures we produce when we talk shape the way we think?). There is much yet to learn about if, when, and how language shapes thought. -
Heuristics: Tools for an Uncertain World - Neth, Hansjörg
We distinguish between situations of risk, where all options, consequences, and probabilities are known, and situations of uncertainty, where they are not. Probability theory and statistics are the best tools for deciding under risk but not under uncertainty, which characterizes most relevant problems that humans have to solve. Uncertainty requires simple heuristics that are robust rather than optimal. We propose to think of the mind as an adaptive toolbox and introduce the descriptive study of heuristics, their building blocks, and the core capacities they exploit. The question of which heuristic to select for which class of problems is the topic of the normative study of ecological rationality. We discuss earlier views on the nature of heuristics that maintained that heuristics are always less accurate because they ignore information and demand less effort. Contrary to this accuracy–effort trade‐off view, heuristics can lead to more accurate inferences—under uncertainty—than strategies that use more information and computation. The study of heuristics opens up a new perspective on the nature of both cognition and rationality. In a world of uncertainty, Homo sapiens might well be called Homo heuristicus.