Matthew D. Blanchard, Eugene Aidman, Lazar Stankov
et al.
Abstract When individuals collaborate, they often rely on momentary estimates of their own and their partner’s confidence (decision confidence) to guide collective decisions and achieve their goals. Through interaction, these confidence estimates tend to align over time. This process is known as confidence matching. More stable, dispositional trait confidence is also emerging as a key factor shaping the dynamics and outcomes of collaborative action. We examined how trait confidence and type of communication impact the accuracy of dyadic decisions, decision confidence, and the dynamics of decision confidence, including decision-specific confidence matching. In this study, 210 participants completed general knowledge tests individually and collaboratively, forming 105 dyads. The tests were completed under three communication conditions: isolated (no interaction), passive (viewing the partner’s response and numeric confidence rating), and active (verbal discussion). Participants assessed as high-trait or low-trait confidence were allocated to three types of dyads: low-trait (two low-trait members), mixed-trait (one low-trait and one high-trait member), or high-trait (two high-trait members) confidence dyads. Statistically controlling for cognitive ability, trait confidence moderated decision accuracy and decision confidence gains: dyads with mixed-trait or high-trait confidence showed greater decision accuracy improvements in the active than the passive communication condition compared to their individual decisions. Whereas low-trait confidence dyads benefited equally from active and passive communication. Collaboration increased decision confidence overall, especially for high-trait confidence dyads under active communication. Decision-specific confidence matching occurred rapidly in both passive and active communication but predicted decision accuracy gains only in the passive condition where participants had limited social information. Although active verbal communication led to the greatest overall decision accuracy, these gains were not driven by decision-specific confidence matching. Our findings highlight the critical role of trait confidence in shaping collaborative outcomes in dyads and extend previous research by showing that decision-specific confidence matching occurs naturally during verbal communication. Significance statement When two people collaborate to make decisions, we often assume that “two heads are better than one.” However, the benefits of dyadic decision-making depend on how effectively group members share and interpret their confidence in judgments. Our study highlights trait confidence, an individual’s stable tendency to express confidence, as a critical yet often overlooked factor that shapes the success of dyadic decisions. We found that trait confidence moderates dyadic improvements in both decision accuracy and decision confidence. Importantly, the effectiveness of dyadic collaboration depends on the type of communication: verbal discussions maximized accuracy gains for dyads with high or mixed levels of trait confidence, whereas simpler, non-verbal exchanges were sufficient for low-trait confidence dyads. Additionally, we demonstrated that dyad members naturally align their levels of confidence (a process known as confidence matching) during verbal discussions. This extends prior research showing that the language used to express confidence becomes more similar over time and that confidence matching has previously been observed only under artificial, numeric rating contexts. These insights enhance our understanding of how individual differences in trait confidence and communication modes influence collaborative decisions, providing practical guidance for effectively structuring collaborative interactions and pairing partners in applied settings.
Abstract Due to severe time constraints, goalkeepers regularly face the challenging task to make decisions within just a few hundred milliseconds. A key finding of anticipation research is that experts outperform novices by using advanced cues which can be derived from either kinematic or contextual information. Yet, how context modulates decision-making in split-second decisions remains to be determined. Here, we aimed at examining the influence of contextual information on real-time evidence accumulation in split-second decision-making using handball penalty decisions. In Exp. 1 we validated the applicability of hierarchical drift–diffusion modeling (HDDM) for the chosen split-second handball penalty scenario. Following validation, Exp. 2 directly addressed the main aim, namely, to examine how contextual information affects the HDDM parameters drift rate, as the rate of evidence accumulation, and non-decision time, which encompasses perceptual and motor processes. Participants predicted shot direction in temporally occluded videos of handball penalties, with probability (i.e., contextual) information regarding the shot direction being manipulated in half of the trials. Results showed that contextual information systematically affected the drift rate, indicating faster evidence accumulation when context information predicts the subsequent action. Vice versa, incongruent context information resulted in slower evidence accumulation. By contrast, non-decision time was only affected by the mere presence of contextual information (i.e., longer with context information). Our study is the first to show that contextual information modulates evidence accumulation on extremely short timescales in highly time-constrained penalty decisions.
Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have driven a growing effort to create digital duplicates. These semi-autonomous recreations of living and dead people can be used for many purposes. Some of these purposes include tutoring, coping with grief, and attending business meetings. However, the normative implications of digital duplicates remain obscure, particularly considering the possibility of them being applied to genocide memory and education. To address this gap, we examine normative possibilities and risks associated with the use of more advanced forms of generative AI-enhanced duplicates for transmitting Holocaust survivor testimonies. We first review the historical and contemporary uses of survivor testimonies. Then, we scrutinize the possible benefits of using digital duplicates in this context and apply the Minimally Viable Permissibility Principle (MVPP). The MVPP is an analytical framework for evaluating the risks of digital duplicates. It includes five core components: the need for authentic presence, consent, positive value, transparency, and harm-risk mitigation. Using MVPP, we identify potential harms digital duplicates might pose to different actors, including survivors, users, and developers. We also propose technical and socio-technical mitigation strategies to address these harms.
Communication. Mass media, Consciousness. Cognition
Yang Yuanping, Maimaiti Bumairiyemu, Chen Guiming
et al.
With the acceleration of agricultural modernization, problems such as agricultural nonpoint source pollution and the proliferation of agricultural carbon emissions have become increasingly prominent. In this context, promoting sustainable agricultural development; ensuring national food, resource, and ecological security, and accelerating high-quality agricultural development have become inevitable trends. Promoting the green development of agriculture is one of the core tasks of high-quality agricultural development, and the implementation of green production behavior is the key to promoting the green transformation of agriculture. Farmers are not only the main bodies of agricultural production, but also the main implementers of green production. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to clarify the factors influencing farmers' green production behavior and the relative importance of each influencing factor. Based on the perspective of the entire industry chain and survey data of 360 lychee growers in major lychee-producing areas of Guangzhou City from May to August 2022, this study uses an ordered logistic regression model to explore and analyze the influencing factors of the green production behavior of lychee growers. The importance of these results is then ranked using the random forest model. The organic combination of these two methods overcomes the limitations of a single statistical method. The results show that 1) the age and part-time employment of lychee growers and the lychee planting area significantly negatively affect the implementation of their green production behavior; 2) production safety, environmental, and policy cognition can effectively promote the adoption of lychee growers' green production behaviors; 3) village rules and regulations, increasing green production subsidies, identifying geographical indication product brands, government satisfaction, participating in training and increasing agricultural income all significantly positively affect the lychee growers' green production behavior; and 4) the relative importance of explanatory variables ranks from high to low as follows: policy cognition, formulating village rules and regulations, production safety cognition, identifying geographical indication product brands, environmental cognition, increasing agricultural income, age, the planting area of lychee, participating in training, increasing green production subsidies, government satisfaction, and part-time employment. The four influencing factors are also ranked in order of importance: cognitive characteristics, external environment, family business characteristics, and personal characteristics. Accordingly, this study suggests that the government should first, based on respecting the subjectivity of lychee growers, formulate relevant policies according to local conditions to stimulate the internal power of their sustainable development, stimulate their consciousness, and improve their responsibility toward green production by increasing green production subsidies by realizing the visualization of income and benefits, building a diversified publicity and training system, and other means. A supervision mechanism should be established to standardize the behavior of lychee growers, and measures such as market supervision, village rules, and regulations should be adopted to constrain them. Finally, governments must create an external environment conducive to green development by appropriately expanding the planting scale to reduce the proportion of part-time lychee growers; building a high-quality brand image; promoting cooperation among research institutes, universities, and lychee growers; and comprehensively improving their green production levels.
Paria Motahari, Katayoun Katebi, Fatemeh Pournaghi-Azar
et al.
Genetic factors may influence sleep bruxism's pathogenesis. Even though the association between the, 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A (5-HTR2A) serotonin receptor gene polymorphism and sleep bruxism has been investigated, inconsistent findings have been discovered. As a result, meta-analysis was performed to gather complete results on this topic. PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and Scopus databases were searched for all papers containing English abstracts until April 2022. Medical Subject Heading (MESH) terms plus unrestricted keywords were used in the searches. The Cochrane test and the I2 statistic were used to determine the heterogeneity percentage in numerous researches. Comprehensive Meta-analysis v.2.0 software was used to conduct the analyses. Five properly fitting papers were chosen for meta-analysis from the 39 articles acquired during the initial search. The meta-analysis revealed that the 5-HTR2A polymorphism has no link with sleep bruxism susceptibility across the models studied (P-Value > 0.05). The combined odds ratio analysis revealed no statistically significant association between the 5-HTR2A gene polymorphism with sleep bruxism. Nonetheless, these findings require confirmation through researches with large sample sizes. Identifying genetic markers for sleep bruxism may help clarify and expand our current knowledge of bruxism physiopathology.
Jessica E. Marris, Andrew Perfors, David Mitchell
et al.
Abstract Recent work has shown that perceptual training can be used to improve the performance of novices in real-world visual classification tasks with medical images, but it is unclear which perceptual training methods are the most effective, especially for difficult medical image discrimination tasks. We investigated several different perceptual training methods with medically naïve participants in a difficult radiology task: identifying the degree of hepatic steatosis (fatty infiltration of the liver) in liver ultrasound images. In Experiment 1a (N = 90), participants completed four sessions of standard perceptual training, and participants in Experiment 1b (N = 71) completed four sessions of comparison training. There was a significant post-training improvement for both types of training, although performance was better when the trained task aligned with the task participants were tested on. In both experiments, performance initially improves rapidly, with learning becoming more gradual after the first training session. In Experiment 2 (N = 200), we explored the hypothesis that performance could be improved by combining perceptual training with explicit annotated feedback presented in a stepwise fashion. Although participants improved in all training conditions, performance was similar regardless of whether participants were given annotations, or underwent training in a stepwise fashion, both, or neither. Overall, we found that perceptual training can rapidly improve performance on a difficult radiology task, albeit not to a comparable level as expert performance, and that similar levels of performance were achieved across the perceptual training paradigms we compared.
Creativity is widely recognized as being invaluable for human development and a crucial 21st century talent. Preparing students for an uncertain and complex world requires that higher education promote students’ imagination, originality, curiosity, and flexibility and build their capacity to take risks to try new approaches to problem-posing and problem-solving. However, little is known about how undergraduates enrolled in different disciplines view creativity. This quantitative study at a university in the northwestern United States assessed how undergraduate students in different academic disciplines responded to an instrument on creativity measurement developed by Dlouhy (2012). The study asked: How do undergraduates in science, engineering, and the arts compare in their perceptions of creativity, their creativity self-perception, and their views about the role of creativity in education? Through principal component analysis, I found that the three perceptual components of creativity were highly correlated; therefore, I conducted my analysis with a single response variable of overall creativity, representing summed perception across the three components. Through multiple linear regression, I found that academic discipline was a significant predictor of perceptions of creativity, with students in the arts scoring 6.6% higher than students in engineering and 6.4% higher than those in science-related programs. Science and engineering students scored nearly equally in their perceptions of creativity, with science students scoring only 0.2% higher than engineering students. Given the importance of creativity in all fields, I recommend that future researchers explore the potential for interventions in post-secondary science and engineering courses to increase students’ perceptions of creativity.
Abstract Consumers are exposed to large amounts of advertising every day. One way to avoid being manipulated is to monitor the sources of persuasive messages. In the present study it was tested whether high exposure to advertising affects the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions. Participants were exposed to high or low proportions of advertising messages that were intermixed with product statements from a trustworthy source. In a subsequent memory test, participants had to remember the sources of these statements. In Experiments 1 and 2, high advertising exposure led to increased source memory and decreased recognition of the statements in comparison to low advertising exposure. High advertising exposure also induced an increased tendency toward guessing that statements whose sources were not remembered came from advertising. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that the presence of advertising, relative to its absence, leads to a skeptical guessing bias. Being exposed to advertising thus has pronounced effects on the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions. These changes in source monitoring can be interpreted as coping mechanisms that serve to protect against the persuasive influence of advertising messages.
This article proposes to revise the established research approach to Suprematism as a utopian futuristic project. The conceptual analysis of the texts created by K. Malevich (1879–1935) in the period from 1915 to 1922 and devoted to pointlessness has shown that the theory of Suprematism can be viewed as a kind of synthesis of ideas of the fourth dimension (Ch. H. Hinton) and the evolution of human consciousness (P. Ouspensky). It makes it possible to regard the principles of the theory of suprematism through the prism of the concept of the Event. Though the term itself was never used by K. Malevich, the idea of a new way of seeing and a flash of the reason that leads to the possibility of subjective transformation are in line with the meaning of the Event, as seen in philosophical and esoteric thought. The article puts forward the thesis according to which K. Malevich was exposed to these ideas in the atmosphere of spiritual quests of the 1910s and early 1920s. K. Malevich, M. Matyushin, and A. Kruchenykh took part in the production of the opera Victory over the Sun which served as a venue of creative interaction and an outlet for creative approaches and conceptual reinterpretation. Here one can clearly see the logical isomorphism of the artistic practice of the opera creators, based on a specific interpretation of time and the idea of the evolution of consciousness, and those ideas that underlay the esotericism of their time. Another indirect argument in favor of the thesis about the presumed parallelism of the theory of K. Malevich and the concept of the Event is the performative nature of the texts written by the author of the Black Square. According to K. Malevich, through overcoming meaning as the victory over reason and objectivity, the gap between the modus of postulating the possibility of transformation and the real experience of the sense of immortality. This also points to the similarity of his ideas and the esoteric project of irrational cognition and control over the mysterious. Thus, Suprematism can be interpreted as the Event of subjective transformation, and the theory of Suprematism can be viewed as a tool that allows one to experience a sense of immortality, accessible to both the creator and the viewer, who develop the creative will for the future.
Andreas W. Schoenenberger, Ian Russi, Benjamin Berte
et al.
Abstract Background This study evaluated the use of comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) in older patients undergoing pacemaker implantation. Methods In this prospective cohort, CGA was performed in 197 patients ≥75 years at pacemaker implantation and yearly thereafter. CGA embraced the following domains: cognition, mobility, nutrition, activities of daily living (ADLs), and falls (with or without loss of consciousness). Based on comorbidities, the Charlson comorbidity index (CCI) was calculated. For predictive analysis, logistic regression was used. Results During a mean follow-up duration of 2.4 years, the incidence rates of syncope decreased from 0.46 to 0.04 events per year (p < 0.001), and that of falls without loss of consciousness from 0.27 to 0.15 (p < 0.001) before vs. after implantation. Sixty-three patients (32.0%) died. Impaired mobility (OR 2.60, 95%CI 1.22–5.54, p = 0.013), malnutrition (OR 3.26, 95%CI 1.52–7.01, p = 0.002), and a higher CCI (OR per point increase 1.25, 95%CI 1.04–1.50, p = 0.019) at baseline were significant predictors of mortality. Among 169 patients who survived for more than 1 year and thus underwent follow-up CGA, CGA domains did not deteriorate during follow-up, except for ADLs. This decline in ADLs during follow-up was the strongest predictor of later nursing home admission (OR 9.29, 95%CI 1.82–47.49, p = 0.007). Higher baseline age (OR per year increase 1.10, 95%CI 1.02–1.20, p = 0.018) and a higher baseline CCI (OR per point increase 1.32, 95%CI 1.05–1.65, p = 0.017) were associated with a decline in ADLs during follow-up. Conclusions CGA is useful to detect functional deficits, which are associated with mortality or nursing home admission after pacemaker implantation. The present study seems to support the use of CGA in older patients undergoing pacemaker implantation as functional deficits and falls are amenable to geriatric interventions.
Abstract Background We report on a stroke patient with disorder of consciousness (DOC) who underwent repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and showed recovery of an injured upper ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) injury, which was demonstrated by using serial diffusion tensor tractography (DTT). Case presentation A 45-year-old male patient was diagnosed as subarachnoid and intracerebral hemorrhages in the left fronto-parieto-temporal lobes. At 5 months after onset, the patient exhibited a persistent vegetative state, with a Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) score of 4. He underwent comprehensive rehabilitative therapy that included drugs for recovery of impaired consciousness and rTMS of the right dorsolateral prefrontal lobe. He recovered to a minimally conscious state (CRS-R: 13) at 7 months after onset and was transferred to a local rehabilitation hospital where he underwent similar rehabilitation but without rTMS. At 9 months after onset, his CRS-R score remained at 13. He was then readmitted to our hospital and underwent rehabilitation with rTMS until 10 months after onset. His CRS-R remained at 13, but his higher cognition had improved. The tract volume (TV) of the neural tract in the right prefrontal lobe in the upper ARAS on the 7-month DTT was higher than that on the 5-month DTT. However, compared to the 7-month DTT, the right prefrontal lobe TV was lower on the 9-month DTT. On the 10-month DTT, the TV of that neural tract had again increased. Conclusions Increases in neural TV in the right prefrontal lobe of the upper ARAS that were associated with the periods of rTMS application were demonstrated in a stroke patient with DOC.
Anna K. Bobak, Viktoria R. Mileva, Peter J. B. Hancock
Abstract The role of image colour in face identification has received little attention in research despite the importance of identifying people from photographs in identity documents (IDs). Here, in two experiments, we investigated whether colour congruency of two photographs, shown side by side, affects face-matching accuracy. Participants were presented with two images from the Models Face Matching Test (experiment 1) and a newly devised matching task incorporating female faces (experiment 2) and asked to decide whether they show the same person or two different people. The photographs were either both in colour, both in grayscale, or mixed (one in grayscale and one in colour). Participants were more likely to accept a pair of images as a “match”, i.e. same person, in the mixed condition, regardless of whether the identity of the pair was the same or not. This demonstrates a clear shift in bias between “congruent” colour conditions and the mixed trials. In addition, there was a small decline in accuracy in the mixed condition, relative to when the images were presented in colour. Our study provides the first evidence that the hue of document photographs matters for face-matching performance. This finding has important implications for the design and regulation of photographic ID worldwide.
Inhibitory control can be triggered directly via the retrieval of previously acquired stimulus-stop associations from memory. However, a recent study suggests that this item-specific stop learning may be mediated via expectancies of the contingencies in play (Best, Lawrence, Logan, McLaren, & Verbruggen, 2016). This could indicate that stimulus-stop learning also induces strategic proactive changes in performance. We further tested this hypothesis in the present study. In addition to measuring expectancies following task completion, we introduced a between-subjects expectancy manipulation in which one group of participants were informed about the stimulus-stop contingencies and another group did not receive any information about the stimulus-stop contingencies. Moreover, we combined this instruction manipulation with a distractor manipulation that was previously used to examine strategic proactive adjustments. We found that the stop-associated items slowed responding in both conditions. Furthermore, participants in both conditions generated expectancies following task completion that were consistent with the stimulus-stop contingencies. The distractor manipulation was ineffective. However, we found differences in the relationship between the expectancy ratings and task performance: in the instructed condition, the expectancies reliably correlated with the response slowing for the stop-associated items, whereas in the uninstructed condition we found no reliable correlation. These differences between the correlations were reliable, and our conclusions were further supported by Bayesian analyses. We conclude that stimulus-stop associations that are acquired either via task instructions or via task practice have similar effects on behaviour but could differ in how they elicit response slowing.