Decision avoidance and post-decision regret: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Decision Avoidance (DA) strategies allow people to forego or abandon effortful deliberation by postponing, bypassing, or delegating a decision. DA is thought to reduce regret, primarily by allowing decision makers to evade personal responsibility for potential negative outcomes. We tested this relation between DA and post-decision regret in a multilevel meta-analysis of 59 effect estimates coming from 13 papers. Five DA strategies were considered: status quo preservation, action omission, inaction inertia, choice delegation and choice deferral. Across all effects and DA strategies, there was a non-significant trend toward DA reducing regret (Hedges' g = -0.23, p = 0.063). When assessing individual strategies, we found that only status quo preservation reduced regret reliably (Hedges' g = -0.45, p = 0.006). The relationship between DA and regret was unclear for the other DA strategies. We tested a number of moderators for the effect. Only 'previous experience' (i.e., the outcome of a previous decision) influenced the relation between DA and regret reliably. That is, if participants choose the DA option when the same choice previously led to a negative outcome, regret is actually enhanced. Overall, there is clear evidence that status quo preservation can reduce regret, but it is currently unclear whether the same holds for other DA strategies.

Keeping track of 'alternative facts': The neural correlates of processing misinformation corrections.

Upon receiving a correction, initially presented misinformation often continues to influence people's judgment and reasoning. Whereas some researchers believe that this so-called continued influence effect of misinformation (CIEM) simply arises from the insufficient encoding and integration of corrective claims, others assume that it arises from a competition between the correct information and the initial misinformation in memory. To examine these possibilities, we conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. In each study, participants were asked to (a) read a series of brief news reports that contained confirmations or corrections of prior information and (b) evaluate whether subsequently presented memory probes matched the reports' correct facts rather than the initial misinformation. Both studies revealed that following correction-containing news reports, participants struggled to refute mismatching memory probes, especially when they referred to initial misinformation (as opposed to mismatching probes with novel information). We found little evidence, however, that the encoding of confirmations and corrections produced systematic neural processing differences indicative of distinct encoding strategies. Instead, we discovered that following corrections, participants exhibited increased activity in the left angular gyrus and the bilateral precuneus in response to mismatching memory probes that contained prior misinformation, compared to novel mismatch probes. These findings favour the notion that people's susceptibility to the CIEM arises from the concurrent retention of both correct and incorrect information in memory.

Behavioral and neural evidence for an evaluative bias against other people's mundane interracial encounters.

Evaluating other people's social encounters from a third-person perspective is an ubiquitous activity of daily life. Yet little is known about how these evaluations are affected by racial bias. To overcome this empirical lacuna, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment used evaluative priming to show that both Black (n = 44) and White Americans (n = 44) assess the same mundane encounters (e.g. two people chatting) less favorably when they involve a Black and a White individual rather than two Black or two White individuals. The second experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate that both Black (n = 46) and White Americans (n = 42) respond with reduced social reward processing (i.e. lower activity in the ventral striatum) and enhanced mentalizing (e.g. higher activity in the bilateral temporal-parietal junction) toward so-called cross-race relative to same-race encounters. By combining unobtrusive measures from social psychology and social neuroscience, this work demonstrates that racial bias can affect impression formation even at the level of the dyad.

Acculturation, out-group positivity and eating disorders symptoms among Emirati women.

Western acculturation has been implicated in the development of eating disorders among populations living outside Europe and North America. This study explored the relationship between Western acculturation, in-group/out-group evaluations and eating disorders symptoms among female citizens of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Emirati college women (N = 209) completed an affective priming task, designed to implicitly assess in-group (Emirati) and out-group (American) evaluations. Participants also completed the Westernization Survey, a widely used self-report measure of acculturation, and the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26). Across the whole sample, out-group positivity was correlated with higher levels of eating disorder symptoms. Participants classified as at risk for eating disorders showed a clear out-group preference (out-group positivity greater than in-group positivity). Western acculturation was also positively correlated with eating disorder symptoms. Overall, these findings lend further support to the acculturation hypothesis of eating disorders in the context of Emirati college women.

Exploring the neural substrates of misinformation processing.

It is well known that information that is initially thought to be correct but then revealed to be false, often continues to influence human judgement and decision making despite people being aware of the retraction. Yet little research has examined the underlying neural substrates of this phenomenon, which is known as the 'continued influence effect of misinformation' (CIEM). It remains unclear how the human brain processes critical information that retracts prior claims. To address this question in further detail, 26 healthy adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to brief narratives which either involved a retraction of prior information or not. Following each narrative, subjects' comprehension of the narrative, including their inclination to rely on retracted information, was probed. As expected, it was found that retracted information continued to affect participants' narrative-related reasoning. In addition, the fMRI data indicated that the continued influence of retracted information may be due to a breakdown of narrative-level integration and coherence-building mechanisms implemented by the precuneus and posterior cingulate gyrus.

A fast and implicit measure of semantic categorisation using steady state visual evoked potentials.

There is a great need for objective measures of perception and cognition that are reliable at the level of the individual subject. Although traditional electroencephalography (EEG) techniques can act as valid bio-markers of cognition, they typically involve long recording times and the computation of group averages. To overcome these well-known limitations of EEG, vision scientists have recently introduced a steady state method known as fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS). This method allows them to study visual discrimination at the individual level. Inspired by their work, we examined whether FPVS could be used equally effectively to capture abstract conceptual processes. Twenty subjects (20.9 (±2.1) yrs, 6 male) were asked to complete a FPVS-oddball paradigm that assessed their spontaneous ability to differentiate between rapidly presented images on the basis of semantic, rather than perceptual, properties. At the group level, this approach returned a reliable oddball detection response after only 50s of stimulus presentation time. Moreover, a stable oddball response was found for each participating individual within 100s. As such, the FPVS-oddball paradigm returned an objective, non-verbal marker of semantic categorisation in single subjects in under two minutes. This finding establishes the FPVS-oddball paradigm as a powerful new tool in cognitive neuroscience.

The neuroscience of people watching: how the human brain makes sense of other people's encounters.

Neuroscientific investigations interested in questions of person perception and impression formation have traditionally asked their participants to observe and evaluate isolated individuals. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of studies presenting third-party encounters between two (or more) individuals as stimuli. Owing to this subtle methodological change, the brain's capacity to understand other people's interactions and relationships from limited visual information--also known as people watching--has become a distinct topic of inquiry. Though initial evidence indicates that this capacity relies on several well-known networks of the social brain (including the person-perception network, the action-observation network, and the mentalizing network), a comprehensive framework of people watching must overcome three major challenges. First, it must develop a taxonomy of judgments that people habitually make when witnessing the encounters of others. Second, it must clarify which visual cues give rise to these encounter-based judgments. Third, it must elucidate how and why several brain networks work together to accomplish these judgments. To advance all three lines of research, we summarize what is currently known as well as what remains to be studied about the neuroscience of people watching.

Implicit out-group preference is associated with eating disorders symptoms amongst Emirati females.

Studies exploring the relationship between acculturation and eating disorders symptoms have proven equivocal. Socially desirable responding associated with the use of explicit measures may account for these mixed findings. This study explores the relationship between in-group identity, acculturation and eating disorders symptoms using both implicit and explicit assessments. Emirati female college students (N=94) completed an affective priming task (APT) designed to implicitly assess Emirati in-group evaluations. Participants also completed explicit measures, including the Westernization Survey and the Multicomponent In-group Identification Scale. Eating disorders symptoms were assessed using the Eating Attitudes Test. Only implicit in-group evaluations were correlated with eating disorders symptoms. Specifically, increases in in-group preference were associated with lower levels of eating disorders symptomatology. Furthermore, participants with an actual out-group preference had significantly higher levels of eating disorders symptomatology compared with those demonstrating an in-group preference. These findings support the acculturative stress hypothesis, and suggest that the relationship between eating disorders and acculturation may be better understood with reference to implicit rather than explicit in-group evaluations.

The Headscarf Effect Revisited: Further Evidence for a Culture-Based Internal Face Processing Advantage.

Encoding the internal features of unfamiliar faces poses a perceptual challenge that occasionally results in face recognition errors. Extensive experience with faces framed by a headscarf may, however, enhance perceivers' ability to process internal facial information. To examine this claim empirically, participants in the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America completed a standard part-whole face recognition task. Accuracy on the task was examined using a 2 (perceiver culture: Emirati vs American) x 2 (face race: Arab vs white) x 2 (probe type: part vs whole) x 3 (probe feature: eyes vs nose vs mouth) mixed-measures analysis of variance. As predicted, Emiratis outperformed Americans on the administered task. Although their recognition advantage occurred regardless of probe type, it was most pronounced for Arab faces and for trials that captured the processing of nose or mouth information. The findings demonstrate that culture-based experiences hone perceivers' face processing skills.

There or not there? A multidisciplinary review and research agenda on the impact of transparent barriers on human perception, action, and social behavior.

Through advances in production and treatment technologies, transparent glass has become an increasingly versatile material and a global hallmark of modern architecture. In the shape of invisible barriers, it defines spaces while simultaneously shaping their lighting, noise, and climate conditions. Despite these unique architectural qualities, little is known regarding the human experience with glass barriers. Is a material that has been described as being simultaneously there and not there from an architectural perspective, actually there and/or not there from perceptual, behavioral, and social points of view? In this article, we review systematic observations and experimental studies that explore the impact of transparent barriers on human cognition and action. In doing so, the importance of empirical and multidisciplinary approaches to inform the use of glass in contemporary architecture is highlighted and key questions for future inquiry are identified.

In our own image? Emotional and neural processing differences when observing human-human vs human-robot interactions.

Notwithstanding the significant role that human-robot interactions (HRI) will play in the near future, limited research has explored the neural correlates of feeling eerie in response to social robots. To address this empirical lacuna, the current investigation examined brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging while a group of participants (n = 26) viewed a series of human-human interactions (HHI) and HRI. Although brain sites constituting the mentalizing network were found to respond to both types of interactions, systematic neural variation across sites signaled diverging social-cognitive strategies during HHI and HRI processing. Specifically, HHI elicited increased activity in the left temporal-parietal junction indicative of situation-specific mental state attributions, whereas HRI recruited the precuneus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) suggestive of script-based social reasoning. Activity in the VMPFC also tracked feelings of eeriness towards HRI in a parametric manner, revealing a potential neural correlate for a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. By demonstrating how understanding social interactions depends on the kind of agents involved, this study highlights pivotal sub-routes of impression formation and identifies prominent challenges in the use of humanoid robots.

The neural basis of perceiving person interactions.

This study examined whether the grouping of people into meaningful social scenes (e.g., two people having a chat) impacts the basic perceptual analysis of each partaking individual. To explore this issue, we measured neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants sex-categorized congruent as well as incongruent person dyads (i.e., two people interacting in a plausible or implausible manner). Incongruent person dyads elicited enhanced neural processing in several high-level visual areas dedicated to face and body encoding and in the posterior middle temporal gyrus compared to congruent person dyads. Incongruent and congruent person scenes were also successfully differentiated by a linear multivariate pattern classifier in the right fusiform body area and the left extrastriate body area. Finally, increases in the person scenes' meaningfulness as judged by independent observers was accompanied by enhanced activity in the bilateral posterior insula. These findings demonstrate that the processing of person scenes goes beyond a mere stimulus-bound encoding of their partaking agents, suggesting that changes in relations between agents affect their representation in category-selective regions of the visual cortex and beyond.

A database of psycholinguistic and lexical properties for French adjectives referring to human and/or nonhuman attributes.

The processing of human and nonhuman concepts (e.g., agreeable vs. edible) during basic comprehension and reasoning tasks has become a major topic of scientific inquiry. To ensure that the experimental effects obtained from such studies reflect the hypothesised semantic distinction, potential confounds such as psycholinguistic and/or lexical properties of the exact stimuli chosen need to be addressed. In the current study, normative data of such properties were obtained for a series of 875 French adjectives by asking 8 groups of 20 participants to each rate all words on one dimension of theoretical interest. The collected ratings indicate the extent to which each adjective evokes a sensory experience (concreteness), captures an enduring attribute (temporal stability), refers to a visible characteristic (visibility), denotes a neutral or an affectively laden concept (valence), signifies an attribute of low or high intensity, is familiar to the reader and can be used to describe people and/or inanimate entities such as objects. In addition, for each item its exact grammatical class (adjective vs. past participle adjective), length (i.e., number of letters, number of syllables), and word frequency was retrieved from the lexique3 corpus. The resulting database enables researchers to consider pivotal psycholinguistic and lexical properties when selecting human and nonhuman stimuli for future research.

Stereotype-based modulation of person perception.

A core social-psychological question is how cultural stereotypes shape our encounters with other people. While there is considerable evidence to suggest that unexpected targets-such as female airline pilots and male nurses-impact the inferential and memorial aspects of person construal, it has yet to be established if early perceptual operations are similarly sensitive to the stereotype-related status of individuals. To explore this issue, the current investigation measured neural activity while participants made social (i.e., sex categorization) and non-social (i.e., dot detection) judgments about men and women portrayed in expected and unexpected occupations. When participants categorized the stimuli according to sex, stereotype-inconsistent targets elicited increased activity in cortical areas associated with person perception and conflict resolution. Comparable effects did not emerge during a non-social judgment task. These findings begin to elucidate how and when stereotypic beliefs modulate the formation of person percepts in the brain.

The importance of skin color and facial structure in perceiving and remembering others: an electrophysiological study.

The own-race bias (ORB) is a well-documented recognition advantage for own-race (OR) over cross-race (CR) faces, the origin of which remains unclear. In the current study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while Caucasian participants age-categorized Black and White faces which were digitally altered to display either a race congruent or incongruent facial structure. The results of a subsequent surprise memory test indicated that regardless of facial structure participants recognized White faces better than Black faces. Additional analyses revealed that temporally-early ERP components associated with face-specific perceptual processing (N170) and the individuation of facial exemplars (N250) were selectively sensitive to skin color. In addition, the N200 (a component that has been linked to increased attention and depth of encoding afforded to in-group and OR faces) was modulated by color and structure, and correlated with subsequent memory performance. However, the LPP component associated with the cognitive evaluation of perceptual input was influenced by racial differences in facial structure alone. These findings suggest that racial differences in skin color and facial structure are detected during the encoding of unfamiliar faces, and that the categorization of conspecifics as members of our social in-group on the basis of their skin color may be a determining factor in our ability to subsequently remember them.

Puddles, parties, and professors: linking word categorization to neural patterns of visuospatial coding.

Behavioral evidence suggests that during word processing people spontaneously map object, valence, and power information to locations in vertical space. Specifically, whereas "overhead" (e.g., attic), positive (e.g., party), and powerful nouns (e.g., professor) are associated with "up," "underfoot" (e.g., carpet), negative (e.g., accident), and powerless nouns (e.g., assistant) are associated with "down." What has yet to be elucidated, however, is the precise nature of these effects. To explore this issue, an fMRI experiment was undertaken, during which participants were required to categorize the position in which geometrical shapes appeared on a computer screen (i.e., upper or lower part of the display). In addition, they also judged a series of words with regard to location (i.e., up vs. down), valence (i.e., good vs. bad), and power (i.e., powerful vs. powerless). Using multivoxel pattern analysis, it was found that classifiers that successfully distinguished between the positions of shapes in subregions of the inferior parietal lobe also provided discriminatory information to separate location and valence, but not power word judgments. Correlational analyses further revealed that, for location words, pattern transfer was more successful the stronger was participants' propensity to use visual imagery. These findings indicate that visual coding and conceptual processing can elicit common representations of verticality but that divergent mechanisms may support the reported effects.

When perception and attention collide: Neural processing in EBA and FBA.

Abstract In their timely review, Downing and Peelen differentiate between neural systems dedicated to body perception and body-based person inferences. Rather than supporting their view of these operations as largely separate mental and neural entities, we emphasize reasons to favor a stronger notion of co-dependency.

Exploring the neural correlates of social stereotyping.

Judging people on the basis of cultural stereotypes is a ubiquitous facet of daily life, yet little is known about how this fundamental inferential strategy is implemented in the brain. Using fMRI, we measured neural activity while participants made judgments about the likely actor (i.e., person-focus) and location (i.e., place-focus) of a series of activities, some of which were associated with prevailing gender stereotypes. Results revealed that stereotyping was underpinned by activity in areas associated with evaluative processing (e.g., ventral medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala) and the representation of action knowledge (e.g., supramarginal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus). In addition, activity accompanying stereotypic judgments was correlated with the strength of participants' explicit and implicit gender stereotypes. These findings elucidate how stereotyping fits within the neuroscience of person understanding.

Modulation of the neural network involved in the processing of anger prosody: the role of task-relevance and social phobia.

Individuals with social phobia display neural hyperactivation towards angry facial expressions. However, it is uncertain whether they also show abnormal brain responses when processing angry voices. In an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated brain responses to neutral and angry voices in 12 healthy control participants and 12 individuals with social phobia when emotional prosody was either task-relevant or task-irrelevant. Regardless of task, both phobic and non-phobic participants recruited a network comprising frontotemporal regions, the amygdala, the insula, and the striatum, when listening to angry compared to neutral prosody. Across participants, increased activation in orbitofrontal cortex during task-relevant as compared to task-irrelevant emotional prosody processing was found. Compared to healthy controls, individuals with social phobia displayed significantly stronger orbitofrontal activation in response to angry versus neutral voices under both task conditions. These results suggest a disorder-associated increased involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex in response to threatening voices in social phobia.

Recognition and evaluation of emotional prosody in individuals with generalized social phobia: a pilot study.

Studies using facial emotional expressions as stimuli partially support the assumption of biased processing of social signals in social phobia. This pilot study explored for the first time whether individuals with social phobia display a processing bias towards emotional prosody. Fifteen individuals with generalized social phobia and fifteen healthy controls (HC) matched for gender, age, and education completed a recognition test consisting of meaningless utterances spoken in a neutral, angry, sad, fearful, disgusted or happy tone of voice. Participants also evaluated the stimuli with regard to valence and arousal. While these ratings did not differ significantly between groups, analysis of the recognition test revealed enhanced identification of sad and fearful voices and decreased identification of happy voices in individuals with social phobia compared with HC. The two groups did not differ in their processing of neutral, disgust, and anger prosody.