ABSTRACT Cognitive processes underlying beliefs are central to the adoption of misinformation, yet how social identities shape them remains relatively underexplored. In a preregistered experiment ( N = 455), we tested whether judgements of misinformation varied with identity strength across political, ethnic, sexual and religious domains. Participants rated false stimuli and were randomly assigned to a control, accuracy‐norms, or identity metacognitive intervention condition. We observed greater endorsement of misinformation congruent with group values, often hinging on strength of identification. For conservative, ethnic and sexual identities, group differences were exacerbated at higher identity strength, whereas liberal and religious differences were equal across identity strengths. An accuracy‐norm and a novel metacognitive intervention designed to elicit awareness, motivation and regulation of identity bias produced no reliable reductions across domains. Our findings suggest identity‐congruent beliefs are pervasive and largely resistant to single‐shot interventions. This highlights the difficulty of addressing identity‐driven misinformation with brief interventions.
ABSTRACT Memories are inherently functional, shaping identity, fostering social bonds, and guiding behaviour. We argue that family historical memories—situated at the intersection of individual experience and collective narrative—can serve both personal and collective functions. This study examines family memories of resistance and collaboration during World War II among 96 French‐speaking Belgians from 42 families across three generations. Through interviews, we assessed the importance of these memories and the functions participants attributed to knowing and transmitting them. Results revealed that war‐related family narratives primarily served identity and social functions at the personal level. Directive functions, providing guidance for future behaviour, occurred at both levels but were especially prominent collectively. Resistance narratives served significantly more collective functions than collaboration narratives, particularly collective directive functions. These findings demonstrate that family historical memories serve important functions at both individual and collective levels, with impact shaped by narrative content and collective significance.
ABSTRACT This study advances multidisciplinary contributions to understanding inhibitory control in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. A serious game was developed to provide cognitive and behavioral characterization in educational contexts. Study 1 provides guidelines on best practices for serious game design in applied cognition and neurodevelopmental support. Study 2 examined the game's feasibility for measuring inhibitory control and its concurrent psychometric links to behavioral and emotional functioning. Results suggest suitability for schools, though psychometric evaluation is required. Study 3 implemented an exploratory twenty‐session design, using heart rate variability to examine physiological correlates, which showed that higher sympathetic activation and stress relate to lower performance. Collectively, these data advance applied cognition by specifying how gamified tasks can be tailored to the functional developmental levels of neurodevelopmental children. By utilizing personalized, data‐driven pathways, this game provides educators a viable tool for cognitive screening, supporting practical classroom observation for students with ADHD and co‐occurring disorders.
ABSTRACT This study investigates how plain and apparently simple language can mislead readers in online advertising. Using eye‐tracking and a forced‐choice task, we compared an original smartphone advertisement with a revised version. The revision replaced frequent and generic wording with more specific expressions and substituted a declarative verbal clause with a nominalisation, contrary to common plain language heuristics. Readers of the revised version were significantly more accurate and faster in their decisions, regardless of age and education. Eye‐tracking measures showed reduced reading effort across regions of interest, with the strongest reduction for numerical cost information. The results show that deception in advertising is often misattributed to linguistic obscurity, whereas it more commonly arises from fully intelligible but overly plain and generic wording; by contrast, more specific formulations with less frequent words and explicit structure better support informed decisions.
ABSTRACT We tested the efficacy of cognitive credibility assessment (CCA) to discriminate between truth tellers and lie tellers in three types of lie scenarios: omission lies, embedded lies and total fabrications. We expected CCA to be most effective when lie tellers must make up most details: in the fabrication lie condition. Sixty participants were interviewed about two memorable events. They told the truth about one event and lied (omission lie, embedded lie or total fabrication) about the other event. The order of being truthful and deceptive was counterbalanced. Six verbal cues were examined: total details, complications, common knowledge details, self‐handicapping strategies, plausibility and predictability. A multivariate significant Veracity main effect occurred. Participants reported more complications, and their statements sounded more plausible and less predictable when truth‐telling compared to lying. Significant Veracity × Type of Lie interaction effects did not occur, neither at a multivariate nor at a univariate level.
ABSTRACT Most adults use inner speech, the little voice in one's head, in daily life, but the experience of inner speech is not well understood for adults in middle and older age. Here, we used an adapted online version of the General Inner Speech Questionnaire to examine inner speech use in a group of 126 adults age 40 and above. Results confirm that middle‐ and older‐aged adults use inner speech regularly for a variety of expected topics/purposes, such as executive functioning, emotional processing, and self‐reflection. An exploratory factor analysis reveals nine dimensions in the questionnaire, with “emotions and the past” perhaps being the most salient factor. Finally, comparison to previous work in young adults reveals some meaningful differences, including that older adults report less frequent use of inner speech. Together, these findings provide preliminary insight into the experience of inner speech in adults across the lifespan.
ABSTRACT China's rural revitalization strategy has improved farmers' education, technology adoption, and health. However, the rural economy still lacks scientific guidance, and farmers remain risk‐averse. This study examined the cognitive mechanisms shaping farmers' risk preferences. Based on experimental data, attention, and self‐control were found to be key cognitive factors influencing risk preference, both showing an inverted U‐shaped relationship. Moderate levels of attention and self‐control were found to encourage balanced risk‐taking, while extreme levels reduce it. Moreover, self‐control mediated the relationship between attention and risk preference. The findings further revealed cognitive thresholds, indicating that improvements in attention and self‐control do not uniformly increase risk‐taking willingness but may produce different behavioral outcomes once these thresholds are crossed. By identifying this nonlinear threshold effect, this study advances our understanding of how cognitive capacities shape farmers' economic behavior. Moreover, the findings have policy implications for enhancing farmers' rationality and promoting sustainable agricultural modernization.
ABSTRACT Anxiety has detrimental impacts on international students' language production, which can be further exacerbated depending on interlocutor non‐verbal behavior. According to the attentional control theory, anxiety impacts performance through the disruption of working memory, as anxious thoughts distract the speaker from fluid communication. This study examined the impact of interlocutor non‐verbal behavior on international students' anxiety, working memory, and oral fluency. One hundred and forty‐four international students completed an online speaking task in the presence of four native English speakers, who displayed either positive, neutral, or negative non‐verbal behavior. Participants in the negative condition reported significantly higher anxiety than those in the positive condition. Those in the negative condition displayed more oral disfluencies compared to those in both the neutral and positive conditions. Differences in the impact on working memory across conditions were non‐significant. Findings highlight the importance of non‐verbal behavior by listeners and of fostering supportive communication cues to help reduce language anxiety and promote fluency among international students.
ABSTRACT Dr. Robyn Fivush has significantly contributed to the literature on autobiographical memory narratives. The current study draws on Dr. Fivush's work and examines age and gender differences in (1) the proportion of emotional utterances (positive or negative) in adolescents' COVID‐19 autobiographical memory narratives during their post‐pandemic recollection, and (2) the proportion of emotional utterances (positive or negative) for emotionally and non‐emotionally valenced interview prompts (positive, negative, neutral). Participants aged 12–17 ( n = 90, 69% girls) were interviewed about their COVID‐19 experiences. Results demonstrated that, with age, adolescents produced a significantly greater proportion of emotional utterances. A significantly greater proportion of the emotional utterances provided by girls were negatively‐valenced than positively valenced. Older adolescents produced a greater proportion of emotional utterances to negative interview prompts compared to neutral prompts. These findings have implications for understanding adolescents' post‐pandemic well‐being and extend Dr. Fivush's research on adolescents' autobiographical memory narratives.
ABSTRACT We studied the oral stories 226 U.S. Latine caregivers (most Mexican‐born, earning under $50,000 annually) shared with their children ( M age = 51.81 months) when prompted to tell a science‐ or nature‐related story. Inductive qualitative coding and analyses revealed personal experience stories—reminiscing, caregiver memories, and fictionalized family stories—comprised the majority and most often described outdoor activities. Fictional stories—invented stories, popular children's stories, and folk stories—commonly involved animals. Caregivers most often gave identity‐related reasons for telling personal experience stories and supporting learning reasons for telling fictional stories. Meaning making appeared mostly through emotion and evaluation in fictionalized family stories and reminiscing, and through teaching moments and connections to past and future experiences in caregiver memories, which also included more temporal information. We discuss implications for science learning and practice, and how this work extends Fivush's contributions to family storytelling, autobiographical memory, and narrative socialization.
The present study examined how professional expertise and language proficiency affect lie-truth detection accuracy and truth bias in a legal context by comparing experts (court judges, prosecutors, lawyers; n = 97) with laypersons (n = 95). To this end, a preregistered mixed-design online study was conducted in which participants judged the credibility of 16 video messages delivered by native and non-native German speakers in an interrogation situation. Contrary to expectations, no group difference was found in overall detection accuracy or response bias. Furthermore, non-native speakers were not perceived as less credible overall. However, experts were more likely to judge messages from native speakers as truthful, whereas laypersons were more inclined to judge messages from non-native speakers as truthful. These findings highlight the potential for response bias in experts' veracity judgments of non-native speakers and underscore the need for further research aimed at reducing discrimination in legal decision-making.
ABSTRACT How much information do readers process within a single fixation during sentence reading? This perceptual span underlies reading theories and eye‐movement research. In the present study, we focused on Japanese, where sentences are written using a combination of three types of scripts, namely Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. We adopted the gaze‐contingent moving‐window paradigm to explore the spatial limit of visual processes among beginning second‐language (L2) readers of Japanese. The readers reached asymptotic performance when four or five upcoming characters were made visible. Each left‐window condition, providing one to three preceding characters, hampered reading. The results suggest that L2‐Japanese readers' perceptual spans extend beyond three characters to the left. We hypothesized that the L2 readers' high regression rate may increase the need for leftward information and concluded that such a perceptual span consisted of at least four previous characters and four to five upcoming ones. Implications for language education are discussed.
Current theories offer competing hypotheses on whether feedback that includes the word "you" is beneficial for learning. We examined the effects of this self-focused feedback on college students' problem solving. In Study 1, U.S. students (N = 274, M age = 19.5 years) completed an online experiment in which they practiced probability problems in one of four conditions: with no feedback or self-focused feedback, and in an evaluative context or a supportive context. Study 2 (N = 177, M age = 20.1 years) only had an evaluative context but included a task-focused feedback condition without the word "you" to determine whether the effects in Study 1 were unique to self-focused feedback. ANOVA models showed that self-focused feedback led to the lowest scores on the posttest with novel probability problems, and this was particularly evident for students who received more negative feedback. These results indicate that self-focused feedback can have unintended consequences.
Most cross-race effect (CRE) research has focused on recognition accuracy for unfamiliar faces, though in criminal cases, witnesses and suspects may interact before a crime. Although prior familiarity can lead to source errors, its impact on cross-race identifications is less known. To address this issue, we conducted two experiments examining how suspect familiarity impacts the CRE. Participants first studied cross- and same-race faces (with or without conceptual information depending on the experiment), then viewed a criminal face followed by a lineup with a guilty or innocent suspect who was either familiar or unfamiliar. In both experiments, we found a CRE for unfamiliar but not familiar suspects. Familiar innocent suspects, regardless of race, were vulnerable to misidentification. When conceptual familiarity was added, it harmed the confidence-accuracy relationship. Contrary to court rulings, our findings suggest that casual familiarity can actually be problematic for eyewitness identification.
This study tests Topological Stitching Theory (TST) as an operational framework explaining how Virtual Reality (VR) reconstructs coherent place representations from fragmented spatial environments. It introduces Digital Placeness as a second-order construct capturing cognitive-affective integration through Spatial Coherence, Affective Anchoring, and Narrative Embodiment. Spatial topology analysis of 3872 heritage sites in Xi'an quantified landscape fragmentation as a baseline constraint. Second, a randomized controlled experiment randomly assigned 612 eligible participants to a topology-driven VR system or an information-equivalent audio-visual control condition; 604 participants completed the study and were included in the final analyses. A 12-item Digital Placeness scale was developed and validated. Structural equation modeling showed that VR significantly enhanced all three dimensions (p < 0.001). Mediation analysis indicates that Digital Placeness functions as a core integration mechanism, substantially explaining the association between VR exposure and downstream behavioral outcomes. EEG evidence supported Affective Anchoring. The findings guide integration-oriented VR design.
This study explores the lived experiences and quality of life of informal caregivers of autistic children and adolescents in Chile from a relational and socio-ecological perspective. Twelve caregivers were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling and participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis with a deductive-inductive approach, complemented by computational text analysis. Findings show caregiving as a dynamic adaptive process in which daily routines, work trajectories, emotional well-being and identity are reorganised in response to care demands. Support needs, co-occurring conditions and limited access to services intensified burden. In contrast, formal and informal support, autism-related knowledge and opportunities for personal regulation acted as protective factors. Caregivers described coping processes ranging from active problem-solving to introspective and meaning-oriented responses. Results indicate that caregiving burden is shaped not only by individual characteristics but also by the availability and coordination of support systems.
In classroom interactions over video conferencing platforms, teachers and students gesture, but their bodies are neither physically copresent nor fully visible to each other. Do instructor gestures help learning in this context? We showed participants videos of professors lecturing spontaneously with unscripted co-speech gestures. In some conditions, we edited this recording to mimic the Zoom lecture experience, cropping the video or removing the video altogether. Eye-tracking analyses showed that participants paid significantly more visual attention to the partial gesture condition than to stimuli where the gesturing was fully visible, and they scored significantly higher on an immediate comprehension test if they had seen lectures in the partially visible condition. Multiple methods confirmed significant gesture loss in the partial video condition. We draw on a range of approaches to interpret our findings. This work raises further questions of mechanism for gesture's role in learning in varied instructional environments and embodied contexts.
Health communication sources sometimes present information in ways that are theoretically ineffective for supporting understanding of numeric health risks. This study examined how visual presentation formats influence adolescent college students' comprehension of nicotine-related health statistics. Participants (N = 170) were randomly assigned to view numeric information about nicotine's effects on mental health in one of four conditions: text-only, graph + text, table + text, or image + text. They were asked to answer questions assessing numeric comprehension, recall, and perceived utility of information. Graphs and tables enhanced accuracy for numeric comparisons, particularly among participants with average-to-high subjective numeracy. However, participants given graphs showed lower recall of information only found in text than participants in the text-only condition, suggesting potential distraction. Images increased perceived utility without improving comprehension. These findings highlight the importance of tailoring health risk communications to adolescents' numeracy to optimize understanding and promote informed decision-making.
ABSTRACT Misinformation has become a much‐discussed issue in public and academic domains. One harmful aspect of misinformation is that it can persistently influence people's judgements after clear and credible correction—a phenomenon known as the continued influence effect. There has been speculation that age affects people's susceptibility to the continued influence effect, but previous research has produced inconclusive evidence, specifically across testing modalities. To try and reconcile conflicting findings, the current study used a continued‐influence paradigm wherein causal event misinformation was retracted. Two samples were analysed using correlation and linear mixed‐effects modelling: an online sample aged 21–79 ( N = 259) and an in‐person sample aged 56–92 ( N = 143). Results showed that, when controlling for encoding of experimental materials in the online sample, age had no significant effect on the effectiveness of misinformation retractions, though declining effectiveness was observed with advanced older age in the in‐person sample.
ABSTRACT The sociocultural developmental theory of autobiographical memory maintains that autobiographical memory is a self‐centered narrative product shaped by sociocultural norms. This study tested this thesis by investigating gender effects on agency and communion in significant memories from racially diverse older adults, a population largely absent from past research. Participants ( N = 468; 59.4% female; 50% Black; M age = 68.18) were older Black and White American adults who recalled high points, low points, turning points, and critical events from their lives. We found that gender effects were not uniform but instead moderated by racial background. For agency, Black males scored higher than Black females overall; this gendered pattern was observed in White participants' high‐point memories. For communion, White females scored higher than White males overall; this gendered pattern was observed in Black participants' turning‐point memories. These findings highlight the joint influences of gender and racial‐cultural contexts on older adults' autobiographical remembering.
