"Relational inference denotes the capacity to encode, flexibly retrieve, and integrate multiple memories to combine past experiences to update knowledge and improve decision-making in new situations. Although relational inference is thought to depend on the hippocampus and consciousness, we now show in young, healthy men that it may occur outside consciousness but still recruits the hippocampus. In temporally distinct and unique subliminal episodes, we presented word pairs that either overlapped (“winter–red”, “red–computer”) or not. Effects of unconscious relational inference emerged in reaction times recorded during unconscious encoding and in the outcome of decisions made 1 min later at test, when participants judged the semantic relatedness of two supraliminal words. These words were either episodically related through a common word (“winter–computer” related through “red”) or unrelated. Hippocampal activity increased during the unconscious encoding of overlapping versus nonoverlapping word pairs and during the unconscious retrieval of episodically related versus unrelated words. Furthermore, hippocampal activity during unconscious encoding predicted the outcome of decisions made at test. Hence, unconscious inference may influence decision-making in new situations."

Relations represented spatially?

"Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions."

The part of me which imprinted on _Why I Am Not a Christian_ is chortling. Another part of me, however, is wondering how hard it would be to write "Analytic Thinking Promotes Disbelief in Psychological Studies".

Oh, dear.

"Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed."

"The conclusion is straightforward. Although inferring different processing stages (or 'modules') from additive factors in data is a venerable tradition in psychology, and one that remains popular (Sternberg, 2011), it is a mistake. As Henson (2011) points out, there's too much non-linearity in cognitive processing, so that you need additional constraints if you want to make inferences about cognitive modules."

--- I find it astonishing that anyone would ever have been tempted to make this inference at all.

"My experiment connects to these ideas because it asked people to make a simple judgement (the colour of the ink), like the experiments supporting an optimal information integration perspective on decision making, but the judgement requested was just marginally more complex because we manipulate both Stroop condition (whether the word and ink matched) and colour strength. If you are a straight-down-the-line optimal information decision theorists then you must believe that evidence about the decision based on the word is combined with evidence about the decision based on the colour to make a single 'amount of evidence' variable which drives the decision. In the paper I call this the 'common metric' hypothesis. The logic is a bit involved (see the paper), but a consequence of this hypothesis is that the size of the effect of the word condition should vary across the colour strength condition, and vice versa. In other words, you should see an interaction. Visually, the lines on the graph of results would be non-parallel." --- You can see where this is heading.

"Complex problems in science, business, and engineering typically require some tradeoff between exploitation of known solutions and exploration for novel ones, where, in many cases, information about known solutions can also disseminate among individual problem solvers through formal or informal networks. Prior research on complex problem solving by collectives has found the counterintuitive result that inefficient networks, meaning networks that disseminate information relatively slowly, can perform better than efficient networks for problems that require extended exploration. In this paper, we report on a series of 256 Web-based experiments in which groups of 16 individuals collectively solved a complex problem and shared information through different communication networks. As expected, we found that collective exploration improved average success over independent exploration because good solutions could diffuse through the network. In contrast to prior work, however, we found that efficient networks outperformed inefficient networks, even in a problem space with qualitative properties thought to favor inefficient networks. We explain this result in terms of individual-level explore-exploit decisions, which we find were influenced by the network structure as well as by strategic considerations and the relative payoff between maxima. We conclude by discussing implications for real-world problem solving and possible extensions."

An unusually literal reading of Mencken's "conscience is the little voice that tells us someone might be watching": "We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour."

"Many everyday decisions are made without full examination of all available options, and, as a result, the best available option may be missed. We develop a search-theoretic choice experiment to study the impact of incomplete consideration on the quality of choices. We find that many decisions can be understood using the satisficing model of Herbert Simon (1955): most subjects search sequentially, stopping when a "satisficing" level of reservation utility is realized. We find that reservation utilities and search order respond systematically to changes in the decision making environment."

"Stress modulates instrumental action in favor of habit processes that encode the association between a response and preceding stimuli and at the expense of goal-directed processes that learn the association between an action and the motivational value of the outcome. Here, we asked whether this stress-induced shift from goal-directed to habit action is dependent on noradrenergic activation and may therefore be blocked by a β-adrenoceptor antagonist. To this end, healthy men and women were administered a placebo or the β-adrenoceptor antagonist propranolol before they underwent a stress or a control procedure. Shortly after the stress or control procedure, participants were trained in two instrumental actions that led to two distinct food outcomes. After training, one of the food outcomes was selectively devalued by feeding participants to satiety with that food. A subsequent extinction test indicated whether instrumental behavior was goal-directed or habitual. As expected, stress after placebo rendered participants' behavior insensitive to the change in the value of the outcome and thus habitual. After propranolol intake, however, stressed participants behaved, same as controls, goal-directed, suggesting that propranolol blocked the stress-induced bias toward habit behavior. Our findings show that the shift from goal-directed to habitual control of instrumental action under stress necessitates noradrenergic activation and could have important clinical implications, particularly for addictive disorders."

TBSAAFT, but if they have experiments where perceptual tasks interfere with motor ones and vice versa, they've pretty much nailed a common bottleneck.  Whether that's anatomically localized is interesting to know, but there's no reason a unified bottleneck couldn't be anatomically distributed.  Conversely, without such an experiment, all they'd have is some localization of _two separate_ bottlenecks in anatomically close parts of the brain.  So fMRI seems strictly irrelevant to whether there's a unified bottleneck.

I wonder how hard it would be to construct a Simpson's-paradox situation, where the sign of the ATE from the between-subjects experiment was the opposite of that within each subject?

Shorter: many people taking pointless tests are not actually motivated to try very hard.  Those who are motivated to try hard on pointless tests do better, and are different people in many ways.  In other breaking news, snow is cold and water is wet.  (To be clear, my "bad data analysis" tag here refers to the IQ-mongers, and not to this paper.)

In this corner, a distinguished experimental psychologist who can actually read a paper in PNAS; in that corner, John Tierney.

Review: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2011-08.html#laughlin

"Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. ... two experimental paradigms in which we attempt to build predictive bridges between the beliefs, goals, and cognitive capacities of individuals and patterns of behavior at the group level, showing how the members of a group dynamically allocate themselves to resources and how innovations diffuse through a social network. Agent-based computational models have provided useful explanatory and predictive accounts. Together, the models and experiments point to tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation—that is, compromises between individuals using their own innovations and using innovations obtained from their peers—and the emergence of group-level organizations..."

The silly ESP paper is not actually a methodological outlier --- and that's a problem.

"Contrary to predictions of the systemizing account, autistic children's search behavior was much less efficient than that of typical children: they showed reduced sensitivity to the statistical properties of the search array, and furthermore, their search patterns were strikingly less optimal and less systematic. The nature of large-scale search behavior in autism cannot therefore be explained by a facility for systemizing. Rather, children with autism showed difficulties exploring and exploiting the large-scale space, which might instead be attributed to constraints (rather than benefits) in their cognitive repertoire."

I will give this a fair shot, but the abstract is not promising at all.  A great fit to the one-factor model is, after all, precisely what you should expect if there are really an immense number of factors, but your measurement procedures are all crap and depend on random subsets of them.  (Perhaps I need to turn http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html into a proper paper after all.)

"A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked people searching a problem space. The authors examined how different network structures affect the propagation of information in laboratory-created groups. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. The networks were compared on speed of discovery and convergence on the optimal solution. One experiment showed that individuals within a group tend to converge on similar solutions even when there is an equally valid alternative solution. Two additional studies demonstrated that the optimal network structure depends on the problem space being explored, with networks that incorporate spatially based cliques having an advantage for problems that benefit from broad exploration, and networks with greater long-range connectivity having an advantage for problems requiring less exploration."

Don't miss the referee's report.

I will now venture some predictions before reading the article: (1) they did not employ the control of exposing subjects to a comparably arousing but non-threatening object (something disgusting, perhaps, or attractive). (2) they did not employ the control of something threatening but not an evolved threat (firecracker? live electrical hazard?) (3) There will be no more than twenty subjects, all recruited from their universities.  --- After reading: (1), check; (2), check; (3) N=20, subject pool unspecified. 

"a never-before-described visual illusion where your own reflection in the mirror seems to become distorted and shifts identity.": I'm tempted to try this out.

With a gracious comment by one of the authors of the paper in question.

"human-subject experiments on the problems of coloring (a social differentiation task) and consensus (a social agreement task) [on a network]. Both [are] coordination games, and despite their cognitive similarity, we find that ... network structure elicits opposing behavioral effects in the two problems, with increased long-distance connectivity making consensus easier for subjects and coloring harder. We investigate the influence that subjects have on their network neighbors and the collective outcome, and find that it varies considerably, beyond what can be explained by network position alone. ... strong correlations between influence and other features of individual subject behavior. ... much of the recent research in network science ... often emphasizes network topology out of the context of any specific problem and places primacy on network position, our findings highlight the potential importance of the details of tasks and individuals in social networks."

How could I have forgotten the transdimensional monsters?

I've certainly read papers with worse experimental design.

Nice expository piece by Mark; part of the point here being that we know people who understand words perfectly well can flub what seem like simple logical applications of those words...

On its face, this is bad news for the Westermarck effect, but one would need to look _very_ carefully at the experimental design and in particular its controls. (Also, the big question of the ecological validity of  "rate these faces for attractiveness, sitting in the lab" as an indicator of "I'd hit that, for reals".)

There's another vital lesson here: your model needs to also predict the fluctuations around the mean!

"This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how assumptions about speakers' abilities changed the evoked BOLD response [changes in blood oxygenation indicating neural activity] in secular and Christian participants who received intercessory prayer. We find that recipients' assumptions about senders' charismatic abilities have important effects on their executive network. Most notably, the Christian participants deactivated the frontal network consisting of the medial and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally in response to speakers who they believed had healing abilities. An independent analysis across subjects revealed that this deactivation predicted the Christian participants' subsequent ratings of the speakers' charisma and experience of God's presence during prayer. These observations point to an important mechanism of authority that may facilitate charismatic influence..." !!!!!!

"I knew her work, a little. A few poems in the Paris Review, some elsewhere. And I think the poems were too true, steely odes to single women making a lonely go at living in cities, and so I left them where they were. Maybe one day, when I'm on solid ground, when I am completely surrounded by love at all times, I will feel strong enough to examine that thin line between solitude and loneliness, and how it disappears at 3am, or during firework displays, or when filling the blank that follows "Emergency Contact Name:"."

Using statistical learning theory to quantify the human ability to see patterns in noise. (Found while looking for something else...)

!!! Should I start making CSSR question its purpose in life?

"Seeing red leads men to view women as more attractive and more desirable despite them not being aware of any change in their perceptions. A delightful study from last year that, as the authors note, has 'clear practical implications'!"

And this, children, is how publicizing scientific findings actually comes to create myths.

I predict that this will go down as a classic of experimental psychology: "[S]ublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment."

BBS target article attacking the use of western (esp. American) college students as proxies for "human nature".

Prediction: if you hooked the subjects up to a big blinkenlights-und-buzzenoises machine, it would work just as well as the MRI.

The first edition was really good, so I look forward to the new one.

I feel used. --- Of course, this paper appeared in a journal published by Elsevier, who have been known to produce multiple fraudulent pseudo-journals for money; but I know of no specific reason to believe that this paper is similarly corrupted.

This makes it sound like I'm presenting; but really I see my role as more that of "designated heckler".

Even if this is a joke, it's great. I should definitely consider assigning this the next time I have to teach financial time series...

"Previous research has demonstrated that Bayesian reasoning performance is improved if uncertainty information is
presented as natural frequencies rather than single-event probabilities. A questionnaire study of 342 college students
replicated this effect but also found that the performance-boosting benefits of the natural frequency presentation oc-
curred primarily for participants who scored high in numeracy. This finding suggests that even comprehension and
manipulation of natural frequencies requires a certain threshold of numeracy abilities, and that the beneficial effects of
natural frequency presentation may not be as general as previously believed."

Well, this cuts a little too close to home, doesn't it?

Since (to indulge in self-quotation) about the only thing in actual cognitive psychology which correlates well with "g" is working memory capacity, it's not exactly astonishing that memory training improves measured "g". (But it is a non-trivial finding nonetheless because the memory training does transfer across tasks.)

In addition to all the problems Mark lays out, it seems that the study has no way of differentiating between how people act and how they talk, or between behavior and impressions of norms.

"Boy babies are innately somewhat more interested in transdimensional monsters than girl babies are."

So, I knew that self-reported happiness and satisfaction were noisy, but I didn't realize they were _this_ crappy. I can't see why one would, knowing this, pay them any attention at all...

Now, where did I put the twin study on how executive function is 100% heritable?

John Judis reports on the political psychology of race. (I need to learn more about the implicit association test, because it's not clear to me what it really measures.)

Learn less, live longer.

Needless to say, my prejudices are abundantly confirmed. (But I should really track down the original paper.)

fMRI study of the ultimatum game. More interesting for the light on the incredible over-loading of function on different brain areas than anything else...

Man, what a cluster-fuck of stupidity. (There is a decent behavioral experiment lurking underneath the, in this case, totally uninformative fMRI.)

"Dude! R^2 sux!" (I paraphrase.)

"From 1962–1967, at ages 3 and 4, the subjects were randomly divided into a program group that received a high-quality preschool program based on High/Scope's participatory learning approach and a comparison group who received no preschool program. ..."

Fascinating results (need to re-read carefully), but, Jesus: "In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care."

People evolved to be frequentists. To be read in conjunction with Gigerenzer & Hoffrage's paper.

How do you make people look like Bayesian reasoners? By presenting them with explicitly frequentist probabilities, of course. Ought-to-be-classic paper. To be read in conjunction with Cosmides & Tooby.