With pursuit of incremental progress and generalizability of findings in mind, we examined a possible boundary for older and younger adults' metacognitive distinction between what is not stored in memory versus merely inaccessible with materials that are not process pure to knowledge or events: information regarding news events. Participants were…

Despite numerous investigations of the prevalence effect on medical image perception, little research has been done to examine the effect of expertise, and its possible interaction with prevalence. In this study, medical practitioners were instructed to detect the presence of hip fracture in 50 X-ray images with either high prevalence (N[subscript…

Extraction of global structural regularities provides general 'gist' of our everyday visual environment as it does the gist of abnormality for medical experts reviewing medical images. We investigated whether naïve observers could learn this gist of medical abnormality. Fifteen participants completed nine adaptive training sessions viewing four…

People often engage in unhealthy eating despite having an explicit goal to follow a healthy diet, especially under certain conditions such as a lack of time. A promising explanation from the value accumulation account is that food choices are based on the sequential consideration of the values of multiple outcomes, such as health and taste…

According to previous studies of theory of mind (ToM), social environment and cultural background affect individuals' cognitive ability to understand other people's minds. There are cross-group differences in ToM. The present study aimed to examine whether social environment and culture affect the ToM in Uygur and Han groups and whether the…

Previous studies have shown that the price of a given product impacts the perceived quality of such product. This finding was also observed in medical contexts, showing that expensive drugs increase the placebo effect compared to inexpensive ones. However, addressing a drug's efficacy requires making causal inferences between the drug and the…

Free-recall paradigms have greatly influenced our understanding of memory. The majority of this research involves laboratory-based events (e.g., word lists) that are studied and tested within minutes. This literature shows that adults recall events in a temporally organized way, with successive responses often coming from neighboring list…

Although faces of in-group members are generally thought to be processed holistically, there are mixed findings on whether holistic processing remains robust for faces of out-group members and what factors contribute to holistic processing of out-group faces. This study examined how implicit social bias, experience with out-group members, and…

We investigated the relationship between category learning and domain-general object recognition ability (o). We assessed this relationship in a radiological context, using a category learning test in which participants judged whether white blood cells were cancerous. In study 1, Bayesian evidence negated a relationship between o and category…

With a brief half-second presentation, a medical expert can determine at above chance levels whether a medical scan she sees is abnormal based on a first impression arising from an initial global image process, termed "gist." The nature of gist processing is debated but this debate stems from results in medical experts who have years of…

The historical tendency to view medicine as both an art and a science may have contributed to a disinclination among clinicians towards cognitive science. In particular, this has had an impact on the approach towards the diagnostic process which is a barometer of clinical decision-making behaviour and is increasingly seen as a yardstick of…

Much of the learning that college students engage in today occurs in unsupervised settings, making effective self-regulated learning techniques of particular importance. We examined the impact of task difficulty and supervision on whether participants would follow written instructions to use repeated testing over restudying. In Study 1, we found…

The current study addressed the relationship between subjective memory complaints and negative affect, well-being, and demographic variables by investigating the Hungarian version of Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire. The original factor structure showed a poor fit on our data; therefore, principal component analysis was conducted on data from…

In the United States the color red has come to represent the Republican party, and blue the Democratic party, in maps of voting patterns. Here we test the hypothesis that voting maps dichotomized into red and blue states leads people to overestimate political polarization compared to maps in which states are represented with continuous gradations…

Although cognitive offloading, or the use of physical action to reduce internal cognitive demands, is a commonly used strategy in everyday life, relatively little is known about the conditions that encourage offloading and the memorial consequences of different offloading strategies for performance. Much of the extant work in this domain has…