ABSTRACT
The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of "just thinking." Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anything. Across six experiments, we consistently found that participants' predicted enjoyment and engagement for the waiting task were significantly less than what they actually experienced. This underappreciation of just thinking also led participants to proactively avoid the waiting task in favor of an alternative task (i.e., Internet news checking), despite their experiences not being statistically different. These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Subject(s)
Imagination , Pleasure , Humans , EmotionsABSTRACT
The coordination of intramodal perceptual grouping and crossmodal interactions plays a critical role in constructing coherent multisensory percepts. However, the basic principles underlying such coordinating mechanisms still remain unclear. By taking advantage of an illusion called temporal ventriloquism and its influences on perceived speed, we investigated how audiovisual interactions in time are modulated by the spatial grouping principles of vision. In our experiments, we manipulated the spatial grouping principles of proximity, uniform connectedness, and similarity/common fate in apparent motion displays. Observers compared the speed of apparent motions across different sound timing conditions. Our results revealed that the effects of sound timing (i.e., temporal ventriloquism effects) on perceived speed also existed in visual displays containing more than one object and were modulated by different spatial grouping principles. In particular, uniform connectedness was found to modulate these audiovisual interactions in time. The effect of sound timing on perceived speed was smaller when horizontal connecting bars were introduced along the path of apparent motion. When the objects in each apparent motion frame were not connected or connected with vertical bars, the sound timing was more influential compared to the horizontal bar conditions. Overall, our findings here suggest that the effects of sound timing on perceived speed exist in different spatial configurations and can be modulated by certain intramodal spatial grouping principles such as uniform connectedness.
