Knowledge that Transforms

Attachment security has consistently been found to correlate with relaxed exploration, openness, and mindful attention to incoming information. The present studies explored whether contextually infusing a sense of attachment security (security priming) can improve hearing in young and older adults. In Study 1, participants (29 young, 30 older) performed a standardized pure-tone audiometric-thresholds test twice. In the security-priming condition, a picture of a participant's security-enhancing figure was presented throughout the task. In the control condition, a picture of an unknown person (matched in sex, age, and facial expression) was used as a neutral prime. Study 2 (14 young, 14 older) was almost identical, except that it was preregistered and the neutral prime was a circle. In both studies, participants performed better (had lower hearing thresholds) in the security-priming condition. The current study is the first to show that attachment security improves sensory perception, and these results have meaningful implications for theory and clinical hearing tests.

Previous research has shown that social cues, including eye gaze, can readily guide our focus of attention—a phenomenon referred to as social attention. Here, we demonstrated that internally maintained social cues in working memory (WM) can produce an analogous attentional effect ( N = 57). Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm combined with the dot-probe task, we found that holding irrelevant gaze cues in WM can induce attentional orienting in college-age adults. Importantly, this WM-induced attention effect could not be explained simply by the perceptual-attentional process, because the identical gaze cues that were only passively viewed and not memorized in WM could not trigger attentional orienting beyond the typical time window of social attention. Furthermore, nonsocial cues (i.e., arrows) held in WM failed to elicit the attentional-orienting effect. These findings provide new evidence for the conceptualization of WM as internally directed attention and highlight the uniqueness of social attention compared with nonsocial attention.

Research on political homophily has almost exclusively focused on adults, and little is known about whether political homophily is present early in life when political attitudes are forming and friendship networks are rapidly changing. We examined political homophily using a social network approach with rural middle school students ( N = 213; mean age = 12.5 years; 57% female) from a remote U.S. community. Preregistered analyses indicated that early adolescents were more likely to spend time with people who shared similar political attitudes and values. These effects were most consistent for right-wing authoritarianism, patriotism, and anti-immigration attitudes. Our results show that political homophily is evident at an early age when young people are forming their political beliefs and making decisions about their friendships, suggesting that peer political-attitude socialization may emerge early in life.

Our visual system is bombarded with numerous social interactions that form intangible social bonds among people, as exemplified by synchronized walking in crowds. Here, we investigated whether these perceived social bonds implicitly intrude on visual perception and induce a contextual effect. Using multiple point-light walkers and a classical contextual paradigm, we tested 72 college-age adults across six experiments and found that the perceived direction of the central walker was attracted toward the direction of the surrounding walkers. The observed contextual-attraction effect occurred even when the surrounding walkers differed from the central walker in gender and walking speed but disappeared when they were asynchronously presented or replaced by inanimate motion. Strikingly, this contextual-attraction effect partially persisted in the context of local motion rather than static figures. These findings, in contrast to the typical contextual-repulsion effect, lend support for the distinctiveness of perceived social bonds on contextual modulation and suggest a specialized contextual mechanism tuned to social factors.

New technology invariably provokes concerns over potential societal impacts. Even as risks often fail to materialize, the fear continues. The current research explored the psychological underpinnings of this pattern. Across four studies ( N = 2,454 adults recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk), we found evidence for the role of status quo thinking in evaluating technology. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated the reported age of unfamiliar technology and found that people evaluate it more favorably when it is described as originating before (vs. after) their birth. In Studies 2 through 4, participants’ age at the time of invention strongly predicts attitudes toward a wide range of real-world technologies. Finally, we found that individual differences in status-quo-based decision-making moderated evaluations of technology. These studies provide insight into how people respond to the rapidly changing technological landscape.

People accused of sexual assault are often described as the “real” victim by their defenders, but the impact of “victim framing” on public opinion is unknown. We investigated this issue across four experiments ( N = 2,614). Online U.S. adult participants read a report about an alleged sexual assault that framed the female accuser as the victim (of assault), framed the male alleged perpetrator as the victim (of false accusations), or was neutral about victimhood (baseline). Relative to those in the baseline condition, participants in the assault- and allegation-victim conditions generally expressed more support for the victim-framed protagonist and less support for the other protagonist. The consistency of these effects varied with how often the victim frame was instantiated and whether the report described a fictionalized or real-world case. Across all contexts, however, participants who identified the victim-related language as influencing their evaluations exhibited strong framing effects. This suggests that social-pragmatic reasoning is a key mechanism by which victim framing shapes moral judgments.

We typically think of intuitive physics in terms of high-level cognition, but might aspects of physics also be extracted during lower-level visual processing? Might we not only think about physics, but also see it? We explored this using multiple tasks in online adult samples with objects covered by soft materials—as when you see a chair with a blanket draped over it—where you must account for the physical interactions between cloth, gravity, and object. In multiple change-detection experiments ( n = 200), observers from an online testing marketplace were better at detecting image changes involving underlying object structure versus those involving only the superficial folds of cloths—even when the latter were more extreme along several dimensions. And in probe-comparison experiments ( n = 100), performance was worse when both probes (vs. only one) appeared on image regions reflective of underlying object structure (equating visual properties). This work collectively shows how vision uses intuitive physics to recover the deeper underlying structure of scenes.

The wear and tear of adapting to chronic stressors such as racism and discrimination can have detrimental effects on mental and physical health. Here, we investigated the wider implications of everyday racism for relationship quality in an adult sample of 98 heterosexual African American couples. Participants reported on their experiences of racial discrimination and positive and negative affect for 21 consecutive evenings. Using dyadic analyses, we found that independently of age, gender, marital status, income, racial-discrimination frequency, neuroticism, and mean levels of affect, participants' relationship quality was inversely associated with their partner's negative affective reactivity to racial discrimination. Associations did not vary by gender, suggesting that the effects of affective reactivity were similar for men and women. These findings highlight the importance of a dyadic approach and call for further research examining the role of everyday racism as a key source of stress in the lives of African American couples.

Naturalistic joint action between two agents typically requires both motor coordination and strategic cooperation. However, these two fundamental processes have systematically been studied independently. We presented 50 dyads of adult participants with a novel collaborative task that combined different levels of motor noise with different levels of strategic noise, to determine whether the sense of agency (the experience of control over an action) reflects the interplay between these low-level (motor) and high-level (strategic) dimensions. We also examined how dominance in motor control could influence prosocial behaviors. We found that self-agency was particularly dependent on motor cues, whereas joint agency was particularly dependent on strategic cues. We suggest that the prime importance of strategic cues to joint agency reflects the co-representation of coagents' interests during the task. Furthermore, we observed a reduction in prosocial strategies in agents who exerted dominant motor control over joint action, showing that the strategic dimension of human interactions is also susceptible to the influence of low-level motor characteristics.

Memory often fills in what is not there. A striking example of this is boundary extension, whereby observers mistakenly recall a view that extends beyond what was seen. However, not all visual memories extend in this way, which suggests that this process depends on specific scene properties. What factors determine when visual memories will include details that go beyond perceptual experience? Here, seven experiments ( N = 1,100 adults) explored whether spatial scale—specifically, perceived viewing distance—drives boundary extension. We created fake miniatures by exploiting tilt shift, a photographic effect that selectively reduces perceived distance while preserving other scene properties (e.g., making a distant railway appear like a model train). Fake miniaturization increased boundary extension for otherwise identical scenes: Participants who performed a scene-memory task misremembered fake-miniaturized views as farther away than they actually were. This effect went beyond low-level image changes and generalized to a completely different distance manipulation. Thus, visual memory is modulated by the spatial scale at which the environment is viewed.