Psychological Science

Although older adults rarely outperform young adults on learning tasks, in the study reported here they surpassed their younger counterparts not only by answering more semantic-memory general-information questions correctly, but also by better correcting their mistakes. While both young and older adults exhibited a hypercorrection effect, correcting their high-confidence errors more than their low-confidence errors, the effect was larger for young adults. Whereas older adults corrected high-confidence errors to the same extent as did young adults, they outdid the young in also correcting their low-confidence errors. Their event-related potentials point to an attentional explanation: Both groups showed a strong attention-related P3a in conjunction with high-confidence-error feedback, but the older adults also showed strong P3as to low-confidence-error feedback. Indeed, the older adults were able to rally their attentional resources to learn the true answers regardless of their original confidence in the errors and regardless of their familiarity with the answers.

Previous research on the latent structure of sexual orientation has returned conflicting results, with some studies finding a dimensional structure (i.e., ranging quantitatively along a spectrum) and others a taxonic structure (i.e., categories of individuals with distinct orientations). The current study used a sample (N = 33,525) from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC). A series of taxometric analyses were conducted using three indicators of sexual orientation: identity, behavior, and attraction. These analyses, performed separately for women and men, revealed low-base-rate same-sex-oriented taxa for men (base rate = 3.0%) and women (base rate = 2.7%). Generally, taxon membership conferred an increased risk for psychiatric and substance-use disorders. Although taxa were present for men and women, women demonstrated greater sexual fluidity, such that any level of same-sex sexuality conferred taxon membership for men but not for women.

Practice can improve visual perception, and these improvements are considered to be a form of brain plasticity. Training-induced learning is time-consuming and requires hundreds of trials across multiple days. The process of learning acquisition is understudied. Can learning acquisition be potentiated by manipulating visual attentional cues? We developed a protocol in which we used task-irrelevant cues for between-groups manipulation of attention during training. We found that training with exogenous attention can enable the acquisition of learning. Remarkably, this learning was maintained even when observers were subsequently tested under neutral conditions, which indicates that a change in perception was involved. Our study is the first to isolate the effects of exogenous attention and to demonstrate its efficacy to enable learning. We propose that exogenous attention boosts perceptual learning by enhancing stimulus encoding.

The linear relations between math anxiety and math cognition have been frequently studied. However, the relations between anxiety and performance on complex cognitive tasks have been repeatedly demonstrated to follow a curvilinear fashion. In the current studies, we aimed to address the lack of attention given to the possibility of such complex interplay between emotion and cognition in the math-learning literature by exploring the relations among math anxiety, math motivation, and math cognition. In two samples—young adolescent twins and adult college students—results showed inverted-U relations between math anxiety and math performance in participants with high intrinsic math motivation and modest negative associations between math anxiety and math performance in participants with low intrinsic math motivation. However, this pattern was not observed in tasks assessing participants’ nonsymbolic and symbolic number-estimation ability. These findings may help advance the understanding of mathematics-learning processes and provide important insights for treatment programs that target improving mathematics-learning experiences and mathematical skills.

The development of reading skills is underpinned by oral language abilities: Phonological skills appear to have a causal influence on the development of early word-level literacy skills, and reading-comprehension ability depends, in addition to word-level literacy skills, on broader (semantic and syntactic) language skills. Here, we report a longitudinal study of children at familial risk of dyslexia, children with preschool language difficulties, and typically developing control children. Preschool measures of oral language predicted phoneme awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge just before school entry, which in turn predicted word-level literacy skills shortly after school entry. Reading comprehension at 8½ years was predicted by word-level literacy skills at 5½ years and by language skills at 3½ years. These patterns of predictive relationships were similar in both typically developing children and those at risk of literacy difficulties. Our findings underline the importance of oral language skills for the development of both word-level literacy and reading comprehension.

In the experiment reported here, approximately 1,000 words were presented to 75 participants in a go/no-go lexical decision task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Partial correlations were computed for variables selected to reflect orthographic, lexical, and semantic processing, as well as for a novel measure of the visual complexity of written words. Correlations were based on the item-level ERPs at each electrode site and time slice while a false-discovery-rate correction was applied. Early effects of visual complexity were seen around 50 ms after word onset, followed by the earliest sustained orthographic effects around 100 to 150 ms, with the bulk of orthographic and lexical influences arising after 200 ms. Effects of a semantic variable (concreteness) emerged later, at around 300 ms. The overall time course of these ERP effects is in line with hierarchical, cascaded, interactive accounts of word recognition, in which fast feed-forward influences are consolidated by top-down feedback via recurrent processing loops.

Is it easier to inhibit inappropriate behaviors if one pauses before acting? An important finding for theory and intervention is that children’s inhibitory control improves if an adult imposes a delay before they can act. Such findings have suggested that the passage of time allows impulsive urges to dissipate passively. However, in prior studies with imposed delays, children were also reminded about what they should be doing, which may have aided their activation of goal-relevant information. We tested this possibility by independently manipulating delays and task reminders, and measuring 3-year-olds’ abilities to inhibit opening boxes in a go/no-go box-search task. Task reminders, but not adult-imposed delays, improved children’s response inhibition. However, as in prior work, children who spontaneously delayed their action longer on go trials exhibited better response inhibition on no-go trials. These results pose a challenge to the view that the passage of time plays a causal role, suggest that spontaneous delays index other processes that improve inhibitory control, and highlight the importance of goal activation in developing inhibitory control.

The spread of social influence in large social networks has long been an interest of social scientists. In the domain of memory, collaborative memory experiments have illuminated cognitive mechanisms that allow information to be transmitted between interacting individuals, but these experiments have focused on small-scale social contexts. In the current study, we took a computational approach, circumventing the practical constraints of laboratory paradigms and providing novel results at scales unreachable by laboratory methodologies. Our model embodied theoretical knowledge derived from small-group experiments and replicated foundational results regarding collaborative inhibition and memory convergence in small groups. Ultimately, we investigated large-scale, realistic social networks and found that agents are influenced by the agents with which they interact, but we also found that agents are influenced by nonneighbors (i.e., the neighbors of their neighbors). The similarity between these results and the reports of behavioral transmission in large networks offers a major theoretical insight by linking behavioral transmission to the spread of information.

Uncertainty preferences are typically studied in neutral, nonsocial contexts. This approach, however, fails to capture the dynamic factors that influence choices under uncertainty in the real world. Our goal was twofold: to test whether uncertainty valuation is similar across social and nonsocial contexts, and to investigate the effects of acute stress on uncertainty preferences. Subjects completed matched gambling and trust games following either a control or a stress manipulation. Those who were not under stress exhibited no differences between the amount of money gambled and the amount of money entrusted to partners. In comparison, stressed subjects gambled more money but entrusted less money to partners. We further found that irrespective of stress, subjects were highly attuned to irrelevant feedback in the nonsocial, gambling context, believing that every loss led to a greater chance of winning (the gamblers’ fallacy). However, when deciding to trust a stranger, control subjects behaved rationally, treating each new interaction as independent. Stress compromised this adaptive behavior, increasing sensitivity to irrelevant social feedback.

People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explored occasions when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain dates are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We present causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark denoting the beginning of a new time period increases people’s intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, we propose and show that people’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self.

Memory is critical for learning, cognition, and cognitive development. Recent work has suggested that preschool-age children are vulnerable to catastrophic levels of memory interference, in which new learning dramatically attenuates memory for previously acquired knowledge. In the work reported here, we investigated the effects of consolidation on children’s memory by introducing a 48-hr delay between learning and testing. In Experiment 1, the delay improved children’s memory and eliminated interference. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that the benefit of this delay is limited to situations in which children are given enough information to form complex memory structures. These findings have important implications for understanding consolidation processes and memory development.

A diet rich in fats and sugars is associated with cognitive deficits in people, and rodent models have shown that such a diet produces deficits on tasks assessing spatial learning and memory. Spatial navigation is guided by two distinct types of information: geometrical, such as distance and direction, and featural, such as luminance and pattern. To clarify the nature of diet-induced spatial impairments, we provided rats with standard chow supplemented with sugar water and a range of energy-rich foods eaten by people, and then we assessed their place- and object-recognition memory. Rats exposed to this diet performed comparably with control rats fed only chow on object recognition but worse on place recognition. This impairment on the place-recognition task was present after only a few days on the diet and persisted across tests. Critically, this spatial impairment was specific to the processing of distance and direction.

At the request of the authors, the following article has been retracted by the Editor and publishers of Psychological Science:

Fisher, C. I., Hahn, A. C., DeBruine, L. M., & Jones, B. C. (2015). Women’s preference for attractive makeup tracks changes in their salivary testosterone. Psychological Science, 26, 1958–1964. doi:10.1177/0956797615609900

When speakers selectively retrieve previously learned information, listeners often concurrently, and covertly, retrieve their memories of that information. This concurrent retrieval typically enhances memory for mentioned information (the rehearsal effect) and impairs memory for unmentioned but related information (socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting, SSRIF), relative to memory for unmentioned and unrelated information. Building on research showing that anxiety leads to increased attention to threat-relevant information, we explored whether concurrent retrieval is facilitated in high-anxiety real-world contexts. Participants first learned category-exemplar facts about meningococcal disease. Following a manipulation of perceived risk of infection (low vs. high risk), they listened to a mock radio show in which some of the facts were selectively practiced. Final recall tests showed that the rehearsal effect was equivalent between the two risk conditions, but SSRIF was significantly larger in the high-risk than in the low-risk condition. Thus, the tendency to exaggerate consequences of news events was found to have deleterious consequences.