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What is left after an error? Towards a comprehensive account of goal-based binding and retrieval
(2023)
The cognitive system readily detects and corrects erroneous actions by establishing episodic bindings between representations of the acted upon stimuli and the intended correct response. If these stimuli are encountered again, they trigger the retrieval of the correct response. Thus, binding and retrieval efficiently pave the way for future success. The current study set out to define the role of the erroneous response itself and explicit feedback for the error during these processes of goal-based binding and retrieval. Two experiments showed robust and similar binding and retrieval effects with and without feedback and pointed towards sustained activation of the unbound, erroneous response. The third experiment confirmed that the erroneous response is more readily available than a neutral alternative. Together, the results demonstrate that episodic binding biases future actions toward success, guided primarily through internal feedback processes, while the erroneous response still leaves detectable traces in human action control.
In three experiments, we examined the cognitive underpinnings of self-serving dishonesty by manipulating cognitive load under different incentive structures. Participants could increase a financial bonus by misreporting outcomes of private die rolls without any risk of detection. At the same time, they had to remember letter strings of varying length. If honesty is the automatic response tendency and dishonesty is cognitively demanding, lying behavior should be less evident under high cognitive load. This hypothesis was supported by the outcome of two out of three experiments. We further manipulated whether all trials or only one random trial determined payoff to modulate reward adaptation over time (Experiment 2) and whether payoff was framed as a financial gain or loss (Experiment 3). The payoff scheme of one random or all trials did not affect lying behavior and, discordant to earlier research, facing losses instead of gains did not increase lying behavior. Finally, cognitive load and incentive frame interacted significantly, but contrary to our assumption gains increased lying under low cognitive load. While the impact of cognitive load on dishonesty appears to be comparably robust, motivational influences seem to be more elusive than commonly assumed in current theorizing.
Evidence from multisensory body illusions suggests that body representations may be malleable, for instance, by embodying external objects. However, adjusting body representations to current task demands also implies that external objects become disembodied from the body representation if they are no longer required. In the current web-based study, we induced the embodiment of a two-dimensional (2D) virtual hand that could be controlled by active movements of a computer mouse or on a touchpad. Following initial embodiment, we probed for disembodiment by comparing two conditions: Participants either continued moving the virtual hand or they stopped moving and kept the hand still. Based on theoretical accounts that conceptualize body representations as a set of multisensory bindings, we expected gradual disembodiment of the virtual hand if the body representations are no longer updated through correlated visuomotor signals. In contrast to our prediction, the virtual hand was instantly disembodied as soon as participants stopped moving it. This result was replicated in two follow-up experiments. The observed instantaneous disembodiment might suggest that humans are sensitive to the rapid changes that characterize action and body in virtual environments, and hence adjust corresponding body representations particularly swiftly.
When telling a lie, humans might engage in stronger monitoring of their behavior than when telling the truth. Initial evidence has indeed pointed towards a stronger recruitment of capacity-limited monitoring processes in dishonest than honest responding, conceivably resulting from the necessity to overcome automatic tendencies to respond honestly. Previous results suggested monitoring to be confined to response execution, however, whereas the current study goes beyond these findings by specifically probing for post-execution monitoring. Participants responded (dis)honestly to simple yes/no questions in a first task and switched to an unrelated second task after a response–stimulus interval of 0 ms or 1000 ms. Dishonest responses did not only prolong response times in Task 1, but also in Task 2 with a short response–stimulus interval. These findings support the assumption that increased monitoring for dishonest responses extends beyond mere response execution, a mechanism that is possibly tuned to assess the successful completion of a dishonest act.
We assessed the relation of creativity and unethical behaviour by manipulating the thinking style of participants (N = 450 adults) and measuring the impact of this manipulation on the prevalence of dishonest behaviour. Participants performed one of three inducer tasks: the alternative uses task to promote divergent thinking, the remote associates task to promote convergent thinking, or a simple classification task for rule-based thinking. Before and after this manipulation, participants conducted the mind game as a straightforward measure of dishonesty. Dishonest behaviour increased from before to after the intervention, but we found no credible evidence that this increase differed between induced mindsets. Exploratory analyses did not support any relation of trait creativity and dishonesty either. We conclude that the influence of creative thinking on unethical behaviour seems to be more ambiguous than assumed in earlier research or might be restricted to specific populations or contexts.
Repeatedly encountering a stimulus biases the observer’s affective response and evaluation of the stimuli. Here we provide evidence for a causal link between mere exposure to fictitious news reports and subsequent voting behavior. In four pre-registered online experiments, participants browsed through newspaper webpages and were tacitly exposed to names of fictitious politicians. Exposure predicted voting behavior in a subsequent mock election, with a consistent preference for frequent over infrequent names, except when news items were decidedly negative. Follow-up analyses indicated that mere media presence fuels implicit personality theories regarding a candidate’s vigor in political contexts. News outlets should therefore be mindful to cover political candidates as evenly as possible.
Nurturing behavior may be critically influenced by the interplay of different hormones. The neuropeptide oxytocin is known to promote maternal behavior and its reduction has been associated with postpartum depression risk and child neglect. Contrariwise, the observed decrease in testosterone level during early parenthood may benefit caretaking behavior, whereas increased testosterone may reduce attention to infants. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the interactive influence of testosterone and oxytocin on selective attention to and neural processing of the baby schema (BS). 57 nulliparous women performed a target detection task with human faces with varying degree of BS following double-blinded placebo-controlled oxytocin administration in a between-subjects design. Our results support the idea that oxytocin enhances attention to the BS. Oxytocin had a positive effect on activation of the inferior frontal junction during identification of infant targets with a high degree of BS that were presented among adult distractors. Further, activation of the putamen was positively correlated with selective attention to the BS, but only in women with high endogenous testosterone who received oxytocin. These findings provide initial evidence for the neural mechanism by which oxytocin may counteract the negative effects of testosterone in the modulation of nurturing behavior.