Knowledge that Transforms

Neural processing of objects with action associations recruits dorsal visual regions more than the neural processing of objects without such associations. We hypothesized that because the dorsal and ventral visual pathways have differing proportions of magno- and parvocellular input, there should be behavioral differences in perceptual tasks between manipulable and nonmanipulable objects. This hypothesis was tested in college-age adults across five experiments ( Ns = 26, 26, 30, 25, and 25) using a gap-detection task, suited to the spatial resolution of parvocellular processing, and an object-flicker-discrimination task, suited to the temporal resolution of magnocellular processing. Directly predicted from the cellular composition of each pathway, a strong nonmanipulable-object advantage was observed in gap detection, and a small manipulable-object advantage was observed in flicker discrimination. Additionally, these effects were modulated by reducing object recognition through inversion and by suppressing magnocellular processing using red light. These results establish perceptual differences between objects dependent on semantic knowledge.

This Further Reflections piece was invited by the Editors of the journal to provide additional consideration of some of the significant issues under study in “The Relational Wear and Tear of Everyday Racism Among African American Couples” (Ong et al., 2022) available online at https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221077041 and on pages XXX–XXX of this issue. Further Reflections are not commentaries on a particular article, though they are inspired by one. Rather, they provide broader perspectives on issues considered in Research Articles, beyond those that authors are able to provide in the Introduction and Discussion sections of their articles. The Editors’ objective with Further Reflections is that they will raise the level of conversation around psychological issues of societal importance. Further Reflections are by invitation only.

Bastian et al. (2014) found that sharing a painful experience promoted later intergroup cooperation. In Bastian et al.’s second experiment, 62 participants were assigned to groups of two to six people each. They performed either two painful or two painless tasks and then played an economic game. The present study consisted of two replications of the experiment: The first was a nonpreregistered pilot study ( N = 153 students from the Czech Republic), and the second was a preregistered direct replication ( N = 158 students from Slovakia). Important deviations from the original procedure were that (a) gender homogeneity of the small groups was balanced across the conditions and (b) the number of participants in each small group was fixed at three. No relevant effect of shared pain on cooperation emerged. The findings indicate that the true effect of shared pain on cooperation obtained in the original study may have been an overestimate or that the effect is not generally valid across various contexts.

Repeatedly exercising a perceptual ability usually leads to improvement, yet it is unclear whether the mechanisms supporting the same perceptual learning could be flexibly adjusted according to the training settings. Here, we trained adult observers in an orientation-discrimination task at either a single (focused) retinal location or multiple (distributed) retinal locations. We examined the observers’ discriminability ( N = 52) and bias ( N = 20) in orientation perception at the trained and untrained locations. The focused and distributed training enhanced orientation discriminability by the same amount and induced a bias in perceived orientation at the trained locations. Nevertheless, the distributed training promoted location generalization of both practice effects, whereas the focused training resulted in specificity. The two training tactics also differed in long-term retention of the training effects. Our results suggest that, depending on the training settings of the same task, the same discrimination learning could differentially engage location-specific and location-invariant representations of the learned stimulus feature.

As children age, they can learn increasingly complex features of environmental structure—a key prerequisite for adaptive decision-making. Yet when we tested children ( N = 304, 4–13 years old) in the Children’s Gambling Task, an age-appropriate variant of the Iowa Gambling Task, we found that age was negatively associated with performance. However, this paradoxical effect of age was found only in children who exhibited a maladaptive deplete-replenish bias, a tendency to shift choices after positive outcomes and repeat choices after negative outcomes. We found that this bias results from sensitivity to incidental nonrandom structure in the canonical, deterministic forms of these tasks—and that it would actually lead to optimal outcomes if the tasks were not deterministic. Our results illustrate that changes in decision-making across early childhood reflect, in part, increasing sensitivity to environmental structure.

Theories of how people value and search for information share the assumption that beliefs give rise to the perceived value of information. However, few studies have directly addressed the pre-search processes that influence information-foraging behavior. This experiment examined the influence of pre-search belief updating on the perceived value of information sources. A sample of college students completed a hypothesis-testing, medical-diagnosis task. The experiment used medical tests with equal objective informative value before unveiling a presenting symptom intended to alter the strength of belief in different disease hypotheses. The observed patterns of test selection suggest that changes in beliefs about disease hypotheses result in systematic and predictable changes in test preference—a notion we refer to as the principle of hypothesis-guided search . We also present a simulation of how pre-search processes (e.g., hypothesis generation and working memory capacity) and task variables (e.g., time pressure) influence subsequent information search.

Orientation sensitivity is a fundamental property of the visual system, but not all orientations are created equal. For instance, radially oriented stimuli, aligned with a line intersecting the center of gaze, produce greater activity throughout the visual cortex and are associated with greater perceptual sensitivity compared with other orientations. Here, we discuss a robust visual illusion that is likely related to this preference. Using a continuous response measure, participants ( N = 36 adults) indicated the gap position in a peripheral Landolt C placed in one of eight orientations and eight locations along four meridians (vertical, horizontal, 45°, 135°). The error distributions revealed that the perceived gap was attracted toward the radial axis. For instance, the gap in a regular C would often be wrongly perceived as tilted 45° corresponding to the oblique meridian where it was placed. These findings demonstrate an unsuspected early-vision influence on the perceived orientation of an object.

= 2,890, adult participants) conducted in the field, in the lab, and online documented opportunity neglect: a tendency to reject opportunities with low probability of success even when they come with little or no objective cost (e.g., time, money, reputation). Participants rejected a low-probability opportunity in an everyday context (Study 1). Participants also rejected incentive-compatible gambles with positive expected value-for both goods (Study 2) and money (Studies 3-7)-even with no possibility of monetary loss and nontrivial rewards (e.g., a 1% chance at $99). Participants rejected low-probability opportunities more frequently than high-probability opportunities with equal expected value (Study 3). Although taking some real-life opportunities comes with costs, we show that people are even willing to incur costs to opt out of low-probability opportunities (Study 4). Opportunity neglect can be mitigated by highlighting that rejecting an opportunity is equivalent to choosing a zero probability of success (Studies 6-7).

Familiar faces can be confidently recognized despite sometimes radical changes in their appearance. Exposure to within-person variability—differences in facial characteristics over successive encounters—contributes to face familiarization. Research also suggests that viewers create mental averages of the different views of faces they encounter while learning them. Averaging over within-person variability is thus a promising mechanism for face familiarization. In Experiment 1, 153 Canadian undergraduates (88 female; age: M = 21 years, SD = 5.24) learned six target identities from eight different photos of each target interspersed among 32 distractor identities. Face-matching accuracy improved similarly irrespective of awareness of the target’s identity, confirming that target faces presented among distractors can be learned incidentally. In Experiment 2, 170 Canadian undergraduates (125 female; age: M = 22.6 years, SD = 6.02) were tested using a novel indirect measure of learning. The results show that viewers update a mental average of a person’s face as it becomes learned. Our findings are the first to show how averaging within-person variability over time leads to face familiarization.

We examined how observers assess information-poor allegations of harm (e.g., “my word against yours” cases), in which the outcomes of procedurally fair investigations may favor the alleged perpetrator because the evidentiary standards are unmet. Yet this lack of evidence does not mean no harm occurred, and some observers may be charged with deciding whether the allegation is actionable within a collective. On the basis of theories of moral typecasting, procedural justice, and uncertainty management, we hypothesized that observers would be more likely to prioritize the victim’s safety (vs. to prioritize due process for the perpetrator) and view the allegation as actionable when the victim-alleged perpetrator dyad members exhibit features that align with stereotypes of victims and perpetrators. We supported our hypothesis with four studies using various contexts, sources of perceived prototypicality, due-process prioritization, and samples (students from New Zealand, Ns = 137 and 114; Mechanical Turk workers from the United States; Ns = 260 and 336).