Icon arrays reduce concern over COVID-19 vaccine side effects: a randomized control study.

On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~ 0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this announcement increased vaccine hesitancy among the American public. Two days after the CDC's announcement, we administered a survey to a group of 2,046 Americans to assess their changes in attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. The aim of this study was to investigate whether viewing icon arrays of side effect risk would prevent increases in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy due to the announcement. We found that using icon arrays to illustrate the small chance of experiencing the blood clotting side effect significantly prevented increases in aversion toward the Johnson and Johnson vaccine as well as all other COVID-19 vaccines.

How well do ordinary Americans forecast the growth of COVID-19?

Across three experiments (N = 1565), we investigated how forecasts about the spread of COVID 19 are impacted by data trends, and whether patterns of misestimation predict adherence to social-distancing guidelines. We also investigated how mode of data presentation influences forecasting of future cases by showing participants data on the number of COVID-19 cases from a 5-week period in either graphical, tabular, or text-only form. We consistently found that people shown tables produced more accurate forecasts compared to people shown line-graphs of the same data; yet people shown line-graphs were more confident in their estimates. These findings suggest that graphs engender false-confidence in the accuracy of forecasts, that people's forecasts of future cases have important implications for their attitudes concerning social distancing, and that tables may be better than graphs for informing the public about the trajectory of COVID-19.

Graphs do not lead people to infer causation from correlation.

Media articles often communicate the latest scientific findings, and readers must evaluate the evidence and consider its potential implications. Prior work has found that the inclusion of graphs makes messages about scientific data more persuasive (Tal & Wansink, 2016). One explanation for this finding is that such visualizations evoke the notion of "science"; however, results are mixed. In the current investigation we extend this work by examining whether graphs lead people to erroneously infer causation from correlational data. In two experiments we gave participants realistic online news articles in which they were asked to evaluate the research and apply the work's findings to a real-life hypothetical scenario. Participants were assigned to read the text of the article alone or with an accompanying line or bar graph. We found no evidence that the presence of graphs affected participants' evaluations of correlational data as causal. Given that these findings were unexpected, we attempted to directly replicate a well-cited article making the claim that graphs are persuasive (Tal & Wansink, 2016), but we were unsuccessful. Overall, our results suggest that the mere presence of graphs does not necessarily increase the likelihood that one infers incorrect causal claims. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of mode of presentation on Tower of Hanoi problem solving.

The Tower of Hanoi (TOH) is a classic problem that can be solved via multiple strategies. This study used TOH to examine how mode of presentation of a problem influences strategy use and transfer. Undergraduate students (Experiment 1) or Prolific workers (Experiment 2) completed two TOH problems of varying difficulty (4-disk/5-disk). They were randomly assigned to different conditions in which problems were either high in internal representation (mental) or high in external representation (computer). Participants were better able to complete problems successfully when external representations were available but completed problems in fewer moves when relying on internal representations. In addition, participants spent more time between moves when solving problems mentally, suggesting that external representations encourage speed while internal representations promote accuracy when solving recursion problems. Lastly, both experiments provide evidence that first solving a problem mentally encouraged participants to use strategies similar to goal recursion on a second problem.

Categorization system-switching deficits in typical aging and Parkinson's disease.

OBJECTIVE: Numerous studies documenting cognitive deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) revealed impairment in a variety of tasks related to memory, learning, and attention. One ubiquitous task that has not received much attention, is categorization system-switching. Categorization system-switching is a form of task-switching requiring participants to switch between different categorization systems. In this article, we explore whether older adults and people with PD show deficits in categorization system-switching. METHOD: Twenty older adults diagnosed with PD, 20 neurologically intact older adults, and 67 young adults participated in this study. Participants were first trained in rule-based (RB) and later information-integration (II) categorization separately. After training on the tasks, participants performed a block of trial-by-trial switching where the RB and II trials were randomly intermixed. Finally, the last block of trials also intermixed RB and II trials were randomly but additionally changed the location of the response buttons. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypothesis, the results show no difference in accuracy between older adults and people with PD during the intermixed trial block, as well as no difference in response time (RT) switch cost. However, both groups were less accurate during intermixed trial blocks and had a higher RT switch cost when compared with young adults. In addition, the proportion of participants able to switch systems was smaller in people with PD than in young adults. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that older adults and people with PD have impaired categorization system-switching ability, and that this ability may be related to a decrease in tonic dopamine (DA) levels associated with normal aging and PD. (PsycINFO Database Record