Publications

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design in addition to the original ones, to help determine which theory best accounts for the results across multiple key outcomes and contexts. The present pre-registered empirical project compared the Implicit Puritanism account of intuitive work and sex morality to theories positing regional, religious, and social class differences; explicit rather than implicit cultural differences in values; self-expression vs. survival values as a key cultural fault line; the general moralization of work; and false positive effects. Contradicting Implicit Puritanism's core theoretical claim of a distinct American work morality, a number of targeted findings replicated across multiple comparison cultures, whereas several failed to replicate in all samples and were identified as likely false positives. No support emerged for theories predicting regional variability and specific individual-differences moderators (religious affiliation, religiosity, and education level). Overall, the results provide evidence that work is intuitively moralized across cultures.

Ensemble representations are often described as efficient tools when summarizing features of multiple similar objects as a group. However, it can sometimes be more useful not to compute a single summary description for all of the objects if they are substantially different, for example when they belong to entirely different categories. It was proposed that the visual system can efficiently use the distributional information of ensembles to decide whether simultaneously displayed items belong to single or several different categories. Here we directly tested how the feature distribution of items in a visual array affects an ability to discriminate individual items (Experiment 1) and sets (Experiments 2–3) when participants were instructed explicitly to categorize individual objects based on the median of size distribution. We varied the width (narrow or fat) as well as the shape (smooth or two-peaked) of distributions in order to manipulate the ease of ensemble extraction from the items. We found that observers unintentionally relied on the grand mean as a natural categorical boundary and that their categorization accuracy increased as a function of the size differences among individual items and a function of their separation from the grand mean. For ensembles drawn from two-peaked size distributions, participants showed better categorization performance. They were more accurate at judging within-category ensemble properties in other dimensions (centroid and orientation) and less biased by superset statistics. This finding corroborates the idea that the two-peaked feature distributions support the “segmentability” of spatially intermixed sets of objects. Our results emphasize important roles of ensemble statistics (mean, range, distribution shape) in explicit visual categorization.

Previous studies have shown that ambivalent gender attitudes are associated with attitudes toward homosexuals. However, most of these studies have primarily considered ambivalent attitudes toward women and attitudes toward gay men, and have been carried out in countries with progressive laws regarding homosexuality. In this study, we examined the connection between ambivalent attitudes toward men and women and attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women in countries with conservative sexual legislation. In the first study, participants were residents of Russia (N = 163) and Kazakhstan (N = 194), while the second study used residents of Russia (N = 496) and Belarus (N = 123). Results indicated that benevolent attitudes predicted attitudes toward gays and lesbians better than the hostile ones. At the same time, attitudes toward men and women similarly predicted attitudes toward gays and lesbians. These patterns were manifested among different components of attitudes toward homosexuals. The results are discussed within the social context of the countries.

Description: Visual working memory (VWM) is prone to interference from stored items competing for its limited capacity. These competitive interactions can arise from different sources. For example, one such source is poor item distinctiveness causing a failure to discriminate between items sharing common features. Another source of interference is imperfect binding, a problem of determining which of the remembered features belonged to which object or which item was in which location. In two experiments, we studied how the conceptual distinctiveness of real-world objects (i.e., whether the objects belong to the same or different basic categories) affects VWM for objects and object-location binding. In Experiment 1, we found that distinctiveness did not affect memory for object identities or for locations, but low-distinctive objects were more frequently reported at “swapped” locations that originally went with different objects. In Experiment 2 we found evidence that the effect of distinctiveness on the object-location swaps was due to the use of categorical information for binding. In particular, we found that observers swapped the location of a tested object with another object from the same category more frequently than with any of the objects from another category. This suggests that observers can use some coarse category-location information when objects are conceptually distinct. Taken together, our findings suggest that object distinction and object-location binding act upon different components of VWM.

Recently, Cleeremans et al. (2020a) presented their Self-Organizing metarepresentational account (SOMA) of consciousness. The theory unifies many other views and aptly paints a coherent picture of how a system like the human brain, can experience consciousness. In addition to SOMA, however, Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness (AST) also provides an account of both conscious experience and how a system comes to believe it has conscious experience, by combining different theories (Graziano, 2016, 2019). Despite the plenty of core features that are shared by the two views, here I would like to highlight a potential point of conflict, that I argue makes AST a better account of consciousness than SOMA, at least in its current form.

This N=173,426 social science dataset was collected through the collaborative COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey – an open science efort to improve understanding of the human experiences of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic between 30th March and 30th May, 2020. The dataset allows a cross-cultural study of psychological and behavioural responses to the Coronavirus pandemic and associated government measures like cancellation of public functions and stay at home orders implemented in many countries. The dataset contains demographic background variables as well as measures of Asian Disease Problem, perceived stress (PSS-10), availability of social provisions (SPS-10), trust in various authorities, trust in governmental measures to contain the virus (OECD trust), personality traits (BFF-15), information behaviours, agreement with the level of government intervention, and compliance with preventive measures, along with a rich pool of exploratory variables and written experiences. A global consortium from 39 countries and regions worked together to build and translate a survey with variables of shared interests, and recruited participants in 47 languages and dialects. Raw plus cleaned data and dynamic visualizations are available.

Approximately twenty years ago, Laurent Itti and Christof Koch created a model of saliency in visual attention in an attempt to recreate the work of biological pyramidal neurons by mimicking neurons with centre-surround receptive fields. The Saliency Model has launched many studies that contributed to the understanding of layers of vision and the sphere of visual attention. The aim of the current study is to improve this model by using an artificial neural network as the spatial component of a model that generates saccades similar to how humans make saccadic eye movements. The proposed model uses a Leaky Integrate-and-Fire layer for temporal predictions, and replaces parallel feature maps with a deep learning neural network in order to create a generative model that is precise for both spatial and temporal shifts of attention. Our model was able to predict eye movements based on unsupervised learning from raw image input, combined with supervised learning from fixation maps retrieved during an eye-tracking experiment. The results imply that it is possible to match the spatial and temporal distributions of the model to spatial and temporal human distributions.

Im ersten Teil des Artikels werden die wichtigsten Abschnitte der Entwicklung der Vorstellung von der Person in der Geschichte der europäischen Kultur – die Antike, das Christentum, die Neue Zeit, die Philosophie des Personalismus, die philosophische Anthropologie von Max Scheler beschrieben. Vor diesem kulturhistorischen Hintergrund wird im zweiten Teil des Artikels der Beitrag zur Entwicklung der Idee der Person in der Existenzanalyse von Alfried Längle betrachtet.

Die Differenzierung der Erscheinungsformen der geistigen Dimension des Menschen zwischen dem Ich und der Person, die Systematisierung der Beschreibungen der Person als eines Phänomens des menschlichen Seins, die Vorstellungen von dem Dialog, als einem wesentlichen Merkmal der Person, und von dem inneren Dialog des Ichs und der Person bildeten die methodologische Grundlage für die anthropologisch begründete psychologische Theorie und für das System der Methoden der Beratung und der Psychotherapie. Es zeigt sich, dass die personalistischen Vorstellungen von A. Längle aufs engste mit der kulturhistorischen Tradition des Verständnisses das Wesens des Menschen in der europäischen Kultur verbunden sind und eine Konzeptualisierung der Idee der Person im psychologischen und psychotherapeutischen Diskurs darstellen.

This study estimates empirically derived guidelines for effect size interpretation for research in social psychology overall and subdisciplines within social psychology, based on analysis of the true distributions of the two types of effect size measures widely used in social psychology (correlation coefficient and standardized mean differences). Analysis of empirically derived distributions of 12,170 correlation coefficients and 6,447 Cohen’s d statistics extracted from studies included in 134 published meta-analyses revealed that the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles corresponded to correlation coefficient values of 0.12, 0.24, and 0.41 and to Cohen’s d values of 0.15, 0.36, and 0.65 respectively. The analysis suggests that the widely used Cohen’s guidelines tend to overestimate medium and large effect sizes. Empirically derived effect size distributions in social psychology overall and subdisciplines can be used both for effect size interpretation and for sample size planning when other information about effect size is not available.

Ten healthy volunteers participated in the ground imitation of a microgravity condition. For three weeks they stayed in the water filled tub without bodily support in supine position while isolated by waterproof material (this procedure is known as dry immersion - DI). During this period, they performed computer mouse pointing task and corresponding brain activity was evaluated by means of EEG: movement related and cognitive event-related potentials as well as resting state electroencephalogram were registered). Pointing task was performed before DI and at the time after initial period of adaptation – at the 5th and 17th days of DI. No deterioration of pointing task performance was found. Movement related potentials were not changed as well as cognitive peak P3, and only N1 peak significantly decreased at the 17th day of DI. Occipital alpha EEG also became significantly more pronounced at the 17th day of DI. Dry immersion procedure is thought to reproduce space flight physiological effects quite well, due to the DI specific feature – support withdrawal. Thus, results obtained indicate that support withdrawal also affects brain functioning in a specific way: increased alpha EEG is accompanied by altered visual processing (as indexed by diminished N1). Although these alterations are not sufficient to disrupt well learned mouse pointing task.

The European migrant crisis imposed a challenge to the scientific community to study migration processes, the adaptation of migrants and society to each other, as well as to develop the methodology of these processes. This process became a challenge for the social sphere of European states, which are interested in the speedy employment of migrants. The labor influx can have both positive and negative consequences for the economy of the host state. The study aims at distinguishing the socio-psychological factors of successful migrants’ adaptation. The methods of research include theoretical analysis, the method of expert evaluation, and factor analysis. The results confirmed the existing hypothesis that socio-psychological training should take several aspects into account during the work with a traumatic experience through the symbolic space, including a platform for the dialogue between the local population and migrants, linking the client with the meaning forming characteristics of individuals. The authors pay special attention to the prerequisites for adaptation and propose a psychological board game to form a symbolic transition space for cross-cultural dialogue and increase knowledge about the adaptation processes for migrants and the local population.

Existing studies show that there is a positive association between pro-migrant integration policies and the subjective well-being of immigrants. However, there is a lack of research elucidating the relations between migrant integration policies and the subjective well-being of the host (i.e., non-migrant) population. This study is based on European data and uses multilevel analysis to clarify the relations between migrant integration policy (both as a whole and its eight separate components such as: Labor market mobility and Family reunion) and the subjective well-being of the non-immigrant population in European countries. We examined relations between the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) for 22 countries in Europe and subjective well-being, as assessed by the European Social Survey (ESS) data. The results demonstrated that there is a positive relation between the MIPEX and subjective well-being for non-immigrants. Considering different components of the MIPEX separately, we found most of them being positively related to the subjective well-being of non-immigrants. As no negative relationship was identified between any of the eight MIPEX components and subjective well-being, policies in favor of immigrant integration also seem to benefit the non-immigrant population.

Inhibition of return (IOR) is an inhibitory aftereffect of visuospatial orienting, typically resulting in slower responses to targets presented in an area that has been recently attended. Since its discovery, myriad research has sought to explain the causes and effects underlying this phenomenon. Here, we briefly summarize the history of the phenomenon, and describe the early work supporting the functional significance of IOR as a foraging facilitator. We then shine a light on the discordance in the literature with respect to mechanism — in particular the lack of theoretical constructs that can consistently explain innumerable dissociations. We then describe three diagnostics (central arrow targets, locus of slack logic and the psychological refractory period, and performance in speed-accuracy space) used to support our theory that there are two forms of inhibition of return — the form which is manifest being contingent upon the activation state of the reflexive oculomotor system. The input form, which operates to decrease the salience of inputs, is generated when the reflexive oculomotor system is suppressed; the output form, which operates to bias responding, is generated when the reflexive oculomotor system is not suppressed. Then, we subject a published data set, where inhibitory effects had been generated while the reflexive oculomotor system was either active or suppressed, to diffusion modeling. As we hypothesized, based on the aforementioned theory, the effects of the two forms of IOR were best accounted for by different drift diffusion parameters.

Research on Mental Health Literacy (MHL) has been growing internationally. However, the beliefs and knowledge of Ghanaians about specific mental disorders have yet to be explored. This vignette study was conducted to explore the relationships between religiosity, education, stigmatization, and MHL among Ghanaians using a sample of laypeople (N = 409). The adapted questionnaire presented two vignettes (depression and schizophrenia) about a hypothetical person. The results revealed that more participants were able to recognize depression (47.4%) than schizophrenia (15.9%). Religiosity was not significantly associated with recognition of mental disorders but was positively related with both social and personal stigma for depression, and negatively associated with personal and perceived stigma for schizophrenia. Moreover, education was found to relate positively with disorder recognition, and negatively with perceived stigma. Finally, perceived stigma was positively associated with disorder recognition, whereas personal stigma for schizophrenia related negatively to recognition of mental disorders. In conclusion, education but not religiosity predicted identification accuracy, but both predictors were associated with various forms of stigma. Findings from this study have implications for MHL and anti-stigma campaigns in Ghana and other developing countries in the region.

The large inflow of migrants into Europe in recent years has triggered more frequent discussions on how useful a pro-integrative migration policy is for society. There have been many studies considering various aspects of migrant integration policy, but its impact on social capital, particularly on an aspect as crucial as generalized trust, still requires further investigation.  In our study, we use the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) and data on generalized trust and the mainstream population’s perceptions of group threat from immigrants using the European Social Survey (ESS) database to explore the relationship between generalized trust and both the total MIPEX and its components. Our database included 23 European countries and 39,079 respondents. We hypothesized that a pro-integrative migration policy would be connected with generalized trust indirectly via reduced perceived group threat from immigrants. The study identified a positive relationship between total MIPEX scores and generalized trust mediated via lowered perceptions of group threat. However, the effects of eight individual MIPEX components were discovered to be different. We discuss limitations related to the generalizability of our results, given that patterns may be different in North America where cultural distance between majority and most migrant groups are typically higher. We thus suggest that future research on generalized trust examine variables related to values and cultural distance and proximity between the mainstream and migrant groups.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a neuroimaging method ideally suited for non-invasive studies of brain dynamics. MEG’s spatial resolution critically depends on the approach used to solve the ill-posed inverse problem in order to transform sensor signals into cortical activation maps. Over recent years non-globally optimized solutions based on the use of adaptive beamformers (BF) gained popularity.

When operating in the environment with a small number of uncorrelated sources the BFs perform optimally and yield high spatial resolution. However, the BFs are known to fail when dealing with correlated sources acting like poorly tuned spatial filters with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the output timeseries and often meaningless cortical maps of power distribution.

This fact poses a serious limitation on the broader use of this promising technique especially since fundamental mechanisms of brain functioning, its inherent symmetry and task-based experimental paradigms result into a great deal of correlation in the activity of cortical sources. To cope with this problem, we developed a novel data covariance modification approach that allows for building beamformers that maintain high spatial resolution when operating in the environments with correlated sources.

At the core of our method is a projection operation applied to the vectorized sensor-space covariance matrix. This projection does not remove the activity of the correlated sources from the sensor-space covariance matrix but rather selectively handles their contributions to the covariance matrix and creates a sufficiently accurate approximation of an ideal data covariance that could hypothetically be observed should these sources be uncorrelated. Since the projection operation is reciprocal to the PSIICOS method developed by us earlier (Ossadtchi et al., 2018) we refer to the family of algorithms presented here as ReciPSIICOS.

We assess the performance of the novel approach using realistically simulated MEG data and show its superior performance in comparison to the classical BF approaches and well established MNE as a method immune to source synchrony by design. We have also applied our approach to the MEG datasets from the two experiments involving two different auditory tasks.

The analysis of experimental MEG datasets showed that beamformers from ReciPSIICOS family, but not the classical BF, discovered the expected bilateral focal sources in the primary auditory cortex and detected motor cortex activity associated with the audio-motor task. In most cases MNE managed well but as expected produced more spatially diffuse source distributions. Notably, ReciPSIICOS beamformers yielded cortical activity estimates with SNR several times higher than that obtained with the classical BF, which may indirectly indicate the severeness of the signal cancellation problem when applying classical beamformers to MEG signals generated by synchronous sources.

When storing multiple objects in visual working memory, observers sometimes misattribute perceived features to incorrect locations or objects. These misattributions are called binding errors (or swaps) and have been previously demonstrated mostly in simple objects whose features are easy to encode independently and arbitrarily chosen, like colors and orientations. Here, we tested whether similar swaps can occur with real-world objects, where the connection between features is meaningful rather than arbitrary. In Experiments 1 and 2, observers were simultaneously shown four items from two object categories. Within a category, the two exemplars could be presented in either the same or different states (e.g., open/closed; full/empty). After a delay, both exemplars from one of the categories were probed, and participants had to recognize which exemplar went with which state. We found good memory for state information and exemplar information on their own, but a significant memory decrement for exemplar–state combinations, suggesting that binding was difficult for observers and swap errors occurred even for meaningful real-world objects. In Experiment 3, we used the same task, but in one-half of the trials, the locations of the exemplars were swapped at test. We found that there are more errors in general when the locations of exemplars were swapped. We concluded that the internal features of real-world objects are not perfectly bound in working memory, and location updates impair object and feature representations. Overall, we provide evidence that even real-world objects are not stored in an entirely unitized format in working memory.

The confidence in our retrieved memories, i.e. retrospective confidence, is a metamemory process we perform daily. There is a wide variety of applied research focused on these metamemory judgements and very diverse studies including a wide a range of clinical populations. Yet, the neural correlates that support its functioning are not well defined. We used the activation likelihood estimation method (ALE) on the 18 eligible studies in the functional magnetic resonance imaging literature available on the topic. The main analysis of confidence revealed concordant bilateral activation in the parahippocampal gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, right amygdala and right caudate. These activations support the involvement of a frontoparietal network in metamemory evaluations and the requirement of the medial temporal lobe. Activations for the exploratory high > low subtraction analysis were also noticed in the main analysis on retrospective confidence, whereas our exploratory low > high subtraction analyses showed distinctive activations of the right precuneus, previously attributed to low confident evaluations.

Ensemble statistics are often thought of as a reliable impression of numerous items despite limited capacities to consciously represent each individual. However, whether all items equally contribute to ensemble summaries (e.g., mean) and whether they might be affected by known limited-capacity processes, such as focused attention, is still debated. We addressed these questions via a recently described “amplification effect,” a systematic bias of perceived mean (e.g., average size) towards the more salient “tail” of a feature distribution (e.g., larger items). In our experiments, observers adjusted the mean orientation of sets of items varying in set size. We made some of the items more salient or less salient by changing their size. While the whole orientation distribution was fixed, the more salient subset could be shifted relative to the set mean or differ in range. We measured the bias away from the set mean and the standard deviation (SD) of errors, as it is known to reflect the physical range from which ensemble information is sampled. We found that bias and SD changes followed the shifts and range changes in salient subsets, providing evidence for amplification. However, these changes were weaker than those expected from sampling only salient items, suggesting that less salient items were also sampled. Importantly, the SD decreased as a function of set size, which is only possible if the number of sampled elements increased with set size. Overall, we conclude that orientation summary statistics are sampled from an entire ensemble and modulated by the amplification effect of attention.

The research presented here reports the process of adapting the Male Role Norms Inventory-Revised (MRNI-R) for use in Russian. The full (MRNI-R) and short form (Male Role Norms Inventory-Short Form; MRNI-SF) versions of the Inventory were tested in two studies. There were 1,016 participants in Study 1 and 1,038 participants in Study 2, which investigated second-order, seven-factor, and bifactor models. The analysis of construct validity indicated that the MRNI-R did not fit the data. Therefore, we developed a Russian-language MRNI-SF which fit the data well. The modified bifactor model of the MRNI-SF, which contained two covariances among the latent factors, demonstrated good construct validity and fit the data better than the unidimensional, seven-factor, second-order, oblique, and pure orthogonal bifactor models. Configural, metric, and scalar measurement invariance were supported for the modified bifactor model. The analysis of the MRNI-SF’s convergent validity demonstrated that traditional masculinity ideology (TMI) was related to stereotypes about men, ambivalent attitudes toward them, and negative attitudes toward homosexuals. Taken together, we concluded that the Russian-language MRNI-SF might be used for a reliable assessment of TMI among groups based on gender and sexual orientation.

Artists can represent a 3D object by using only contours in a 2D drawing. Prior studies have shown that people can use such drawings to perceive 3D shapes reliably, but it is not clear how useful this kind of contour information actually is in a real dynamical scene in which people interact with objects. To address this issue, we developed an Augmented Reality (AR) device that can show a participant a contour-drawing or a grayscale-image of a real dynamical scene in an immersive manner. We compared the performance of people in a variety of run-of-the-mill tasks with both contour-drawings and grayscale-images under natural viewing conditions in three behavioral experiments. The results of these experiments showed that the people could perform almost equally well with both types of images. This contour information may be sufficient to provide the basis for our visual system to obtain much of the 3D information needed for successful visuomotor interactions in our everyday life.