A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect.

We conducted a preregistered multilaboratory project (k = 36; N = 3,531) to assess the size and robustness of ego-depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Each laboratory implemented one of two procedures that was intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of self-control. Confirmatory tests found a nonsignificant result (d = 0.06). Confirmatory Bayesian meta-analyses using an informed-prior hypothesis (δ = 0.30, SD = 0.15) found that the data were 4 times more likely under the null than the alternative hypothesis. Hence, preregistered analyses did not find evidence for a depletion effect. Exploratory analyses on the full sample (i.e., ignoring exclusion criteria) found a statistically significant effect (d = 0.08); Bayesian analyses showed that the data were about equally likely under the null and informed-prior hypotheses. Exploratory moderator tests suggested that the depletion effect was larger for participants who reported more fatigue but was not moderated by trait self-control, willpower beliefs, or action orientation.

"Do I have enough food?" How need for cognitive closure and gender impact stockpiling and food waste during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-national study in India and the United States of America.

Food waste is considered to be one of the biggest issues affecting individuals around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic, with the consequent lockdown processes, has recently triggered individuals to stockpile foodstuffs. Recent data shows, however, that individuals have not consumed a good proportion of the stockpiled food, resulting in increasing amounts of products ending up wasted. Using a cross-national survey conducted in the United States and India, we investigate how individuals' levels of need for cognitive closure (NFC) relate to food stockpiling and waste during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a sequential mediation model, we show how individuals high in NFC did not perceive to have enough food at home, ending up buying more food than usual and, eventually, wasting more. Individuals' gender and country of residence moderate such phenomenon, with the effect being more pronounced among Indian (rather than American) women. We discuss how gender roles in different countries can correlate with the stockpiling and food waste processes. We conclude the manuscript by suggesting how public communication and policy making could develop targeted programs to mitigate such issues.

Evaluation of different cochlear implants in unilateral hearing patients during word listening tasks: A brain connectivity study.

Advanced methodologies used for the biomedical signal interpretation allow using cerebral signals to assess important cognitive functions in humans. In the present study, as parameter of cerebral effort, has been employed the isolated effective coherence, in order to estimate the effective connectivity and network organization. The hypothesis was that the lower the number of inter-connections engaged, the lower the cerebral effort induced by the experimental condition. In the present research this index has been applied to test the reaction to the use of different cochlear implant processors (Freedom, CP810 and CP910 - Cochlear Ltd), with the aim to identify the most performing device during a word in noise recognition task. Results support the capability of identifying the device eliciting less brain area connections. In particular, the CP910 was the processor inducing the lower number of inter-connections among the tested ones. This investigation appeared to be worthy, since representing a tool to identify devices that would make available user's cognitive resources for additional tasks, a matter susceptible of generalization to various fields of application. The employment of the cerebral signals therefore open the way to the evaluation of the impact of different sensors and prosthetic devices, also using connectivity measures.

An eye tracking index for the salience estimation in visual stimuli.

Every day we face visual stimuli able to catch our attention, but this aspect becomes crucial if the visual material has the purpose to spread a message aimed at engaging the observer. In this framework, a worthy aspect is how to measure the "visual engagement" produced by visual stimuli exposure. To this purpose, in the present study, employing the eye tracking technique, an index of visual attention (VA) has been proposed, and applied to pictures belonging to antismoking public service announcements, so to investigate the saliency of health-promoting messages in a young sample. The VA index is a non-dimensional index, defined as the ratio between the percentage of the total time spent fixating an area of interest (AOI) weighted on the total time the picture is showed on the screen, and the percentage of the area occupied by the AOI weighted on the total dimension of the picture. It could be predicted that AOI reporting higher VA values will be the ones having more saliency. Three antismoking Public Service Announcements (PSAs) images have been selected for the study and for each of them were identified: i) "picture" (such as a young man with a sarcastic expression depicted while smoking a cigarette, or the image of a lady who underwent a tracheotomy) and ii) "writing" (text of the antismoking message) AOIs. Main results of the analysis revealed that writing AOIs obtained statistically significant higher VA values than visual AOIs (p=0.03), but these held true only for an ineffective PSA, probably because the text was not perceived as pertinent with the surrounding image. On the other hand, an effective PSA obtained higher VA values in response to visual than writing AOIs observation (p=0.02). The VA index appears therefore to represent a useful tool to measure the saliency of visual stimuli elements.

A Neuroelectrical Brain Imaging Study on the Perception of Figurative Paintings against Only their Color or Shape Contents.

In this study, the cortical activity correlated with the perception and appreciation of different set of pictures was estimated by using neuroelectric brain activity and graph theory methodologies in a group of artistic educated persons. The pictures shown to the subjects consisted of original pictures of Titian's and a contemporary artist's paintings (Orig dataset) plus two sets of additional pictures. These additional datasets were obtained from the previous paintings by removing all but the colors or the shapes employed (Color and Style dataset, respectively). Results suggest that the verbal appreciation of Orig dataset when compared to Color and Style ones was mainly correlated to the neuroelectric indexes estimated during the first 10 s of observation of the pictures. Always in the first 10 s of observation: (1) Orig dataset induced more emotion and is perceived with more appreciation than the other two Color and Style datasets; (2) Style dataset is perceived with more attentional effort than the other investigated datasets. During the whole period of observation of 30 s: (1) emotion induced by Color and Style datasets increased across the time while that induced of the Orig dataset remain stable; (2) Color and Style dataset were perceived with more attentional effort than the Orig dataset. During the entire experience, there is evidence of a cortical flow of activity from the parietal and central areas toward the prefrontal and frontal areas during the observation of the images of all the datasets. This is coherent from the notion that active perception of the images with sustained cognitive attention in parietal and central areas caused the generation of the judgment about their aesthetic appreciation in frontal areas.

EEG activity as an objective measure of cognitive load during effortful listening: A study on pediatric subjects with bilateral, asymmetric sensorineural hearing loss.

OBJECTIVES: Deaf subjects with hearing aids or cochlear implants generally find it challenging to understand speech in noisy environments where a great deal of listening effort and cognitive load are invested. In prelingually deaf children, such difficulties may have detrimental consequences on the learning process and, later in life, on academic performance. Despite the importance of such a topic, currently, there is no validated test for the assessment of cognitive load during audiological tasks. Recently, alpha and theta EEG rhythm variations in the parietal and frontal areas, respectively, have been used as indicators of cognitive load in adult subjects. The aim of the present study was to investigate, by means of EEG, the cognitive load of pediatric subjects affected by asymmetric sensorineural hearing loss as they were engaged in a speech-in-noise identification task. METHODS: Seven children (4F and 3M, age range = 8-16 years) affected by asymmetric sensorineural hearing loss (i.e. profound degree on one side, mild-to-severe degree on the other side) and using a hearing aid only in their better ear, were included in the study. All of them underwent EEG recording during a speech-in-noise identification task: the experimental conditions were quiet, binaural noise, noise to the better hearing ear and noise to the poorer hearing ear. The subjects' Speech Recognition Thresholds (SRT) were also measured in each test condition. The primary outcome measures were: frontal EEG Power Spectral Density (PSD) in the theta band and parietal EEG PSD in the alpha band, as assessed before stimulus (word) onset. RESULTS: No statistically significant differences were noted among frontal theta power levels in the four test conditions. However, parietal alpha power levels were significantly higher in the "binaural noise" and in the "noise to worse hearing ear" conditions than in the "quiet" and "noise to better hearing ear" conditions (p < 0.001). SRT scores were consistent with task difficulty, but did not correlate with alpha and theta power level variations. CONCLUSION: This is the first time that EEG has been applied to children with sensorineural hearing loss with the purpose of studying the cognitive load during effortful listening. Significantly higher parietal alpha power levels in two of three noisy conditions, compared to the quiet condition, are consistent with increased cognitive load. Specifically, considering the time window of the analysis (pre-stimulus), parietal alpha power levels may be a measure of cognitive functions such as sustained attention and selective inhibition. In this respect, the significantly lower parietal alpha power levels in the most challenging listening condition (i.e. noise to the better ear) may be attributed to loss of attention and to the subsequent fatigue and "withdrawal" from the task at hand.

The closing of open minds: Need for closure moderates the impact of uncertainty salience on outgroup discrimination.

In three studies, we examined how dispositional need for cognitive closure (NCC) moderates the impact of various types of uncertainty salience (personal and supraliminal in studies 1 and 2; economic and subliminal in Study 3) on implicit attitudes (studies 1 and 3) and explicit discriminatory intentions (Study 2) towards outgroup members. Across all three studies, we found that uncertainty increased discrimination against outgroups among low-NCC individuals but not among high-NCC individuals. High-NCC individuals tended to be more discriminatory irrespective of uncertainty salience. These results suggest that uncertainty salience leads individuals with a low dispositional need for closure to act like those with high need for closure. The implications of the findings for theories about how uncertainty influences social attitudes and intergroup behaviour are discussed.

Need for Cognitive Closure Modulates How Perceptual Decisions Are Affected by Task Difficulty and Outcome Relevance.

The aim of this study was to assess the extent to which Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC), an individual-level epistemic motivation, can explain inter-individual variability in the cognitive effort invested on a perceptual decision making task (the random motion task). High levels of NCC are manifested in a preference for clarity, order and structure and a desire for firm and stable knowledge. The study evaluated how NCC moderates the impact of two variables known to increase the amount of cognitive effort invested on a task, namely task ambiguity (i.e., the difficulty of the perceptual discrimination) and outcome relevance (i.e., the monetary gain associated with a correct discrimination). Based on previous work and current design, we assumed that reaction times (RTs) on our motion discrimination task represent a valid index of effort investment. Task ambiguity was associated with increased cognitive effort in participants with low or medium NCC but, interestingly, it did not affect the RTs of participants with high NCC. A different pattern of association was observed for outcome relevance; high outcome relevance increased cognitive effort in participants with moderate or high NCC, but did not affect the performance of low NCC participants. In summary, the performance of individuals with low NCC was affected by task difficulty but not by outcome relevance, whereas individuals with high NCC were influenced by outcome relevance but not by task difficulty; only participants with medium NCC were affected by both task difficulty and outcome relevance. These results suggest that perceptual decision making is influenced by the interaction between context and NCC.

'Beauty is no quality in things themselves': epistemic motivation affects implicit preferences for art.

Art preferences are affected by a number of subjective factors. This paper reports two studies which investigated whether need for closure shapes implicit art preferences. It was predicted that higher need for closure would negatively affect implicit preferences for abstract art. In study one, 60 participants were tested for dispositional need for closure and then completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) task to measure their implicit preference for abstract (vs. figurative) paintings. In study two, 54 participants completed the same IAT task. In this experiment need for closure was both manipulated by cognitive load and tapped as a dispositional trait. Results of the studies converged in showing that after controlling for other important individual factors such as participants'expertise and cognitive ability, need for closure, both as a dispositional trait and as a situationally induced motivational state, was negatively associated with implicit preference for abstract art.

Framing political messages to fit the audience's regulatory orientation: how to improve the efficacy of the same message content.

This research investigates how the impact of persuasive messages in the political domain can be improved when fit is created by subliminally priming recipients' regulatory focus (either promotion or prevention) and by linguistic framing of the message (either strategic approach framing or strategic avoidance framing). Results of two studies show that regulatory fit: a) increases the impact of a political message favoring nuclear energy on implicit attitudes of the target audience (Study 1); and b) induces a more positive evaluation of, and intentions to vote for, the political candidate who is delivering a message concerning immigration policies (Study 2).