General Cognitive Bias Research Articles

The New Reality: Non-Eyewitness Identifications in a Surveillance World

Cognitive scientists have firmly established the risk of eyewitness misidentifications, and in response, courts have adopted legal safeguards to forestall this possibility; however, there are few safeguards against misidentifications by non-eyewitnesses. We define non-eyewitnesses as people who did not actually observe an event but nonetheless testify about who they think is depicted in a video of the event on the basis of their prior familiarity with the person they believe is depicted. In this review, we discuss the accuracy with which people typically recognize people from videos; in fact, these non-eyewitness identifications are far from perfect. We then explore seven factors that affect the accuracy of non-eyewitness identifications and organize these factors around three categories of bias—case-specific bias, person-specific bias, and general cognitive bias—that are likely to reduce the probability of a correct identification. We conclude with a proposed two-prong framework for determining the admissibility of non-eyewitness identifications in court and call for the adoption of legal safeguards against non-eyewitness misidentifications.

Limits on the Agent-First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean.

It has long been believed across languages that the Agent-First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case-marking in Korean, an SOV language with case-marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent-first interpretation strongly in the noun-verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case-marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent-First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.

The role of inflated responsibility beliefs in predicting symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder and depression

ABSTRACT Objective: Inflated responsibility beliefs encompass responsibility attitudes, the general tendency to accept responsibility, and responsibility interpretations, the appraisals of specific intrusive thoughts as indicating personal responsibility for harm. While inflated responsibility beliefs are central to obsessive-compulsive disorder, it is unclear whether they are also related to other disorder symptomology. Consequently, the current study investigated whether inflated responsibility beliefs predicted unique variance in symptoms of depression and generalised anxiety disorder in a non-clinical sample, after controlling for negative affect. Method: Participants were undergraduate psychology students and community members (N = 182, 43 males, 136 females, 3 non-binary), aged 18-70 years (M = 27.71, SD = 11.86) recruited through convenience and snowball sampling. A cross-sectional, correlational design was employed, whereby participants completed an online questionnaire. Data were analysed using two separate hierarchical multiple regression analyses, one with generalised anxiety disorder symptoms as the criterion and one with depression symptoms as the criterion. Results: After controlling for negative affect and age, an increase in responsibility attitudes uniquely predicted a significant small increase in generalised anxiety disorder symptoms, sr 2 = .03, 95% CI [.02, .08], p < .001, but not depression symptoms. Responsibility interpretations did not predict significant unique variance in depression or generalised anxiety disorder symptoms. Conclusions: Results suggest responsibility attitudes relate to symptoms of some disorders (i.e., generalised anxiety disorder), but not all psychopathology (i.e., depression). Responsibility attitudes should potentially be considered in aetiological models of generalised anxiety disorder. Results suggest responsibility interpretations are not transdiagnostic, although measurement difficulties render this unclear. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic: Inflated responsibility beliefs were first discussed in relation to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and have since been established as central to OCD symptomology. However, it remains unclear whether inflated responsibility beliefs are specific to OCD or represent a general cognitive bias, due to inconsistent study methodology and findings. While reasonably strong evidence exists to suggest that inflated responsibility beliefs may be associated with symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder, these studies have used problematic measures. Limited research has examined the association between inflated responsibility beliefs and depression symptoms, and available research has produced conflicting findings. What this topic adds: The current study is the first to examine responsibility beliefs in relation to symptoms of depression and generalised anxiety disorder using the Responsibility Attitudes Scale/Responsibility Interpretations Questionnaire. Increased responsibility attitudes predicted increased generalised anxiety disorder symptoms but did not predict variance in depression symptoms in the current non-clinical sample. Responsibility interpretations did not predict variance in generalised anxiety disorder symptoms or depression symptoms in the current sample. Findings suggest responsibility attitudes may be somewhat transdiagnostic, evident in some disorders (e.g., generalised anxiety disorder) but not all disorders (e.g., depression). Findings are broadly consistent with the idea that responsibility interpretations might be specific to OCD (although this was not assessed directly in the current study).

Traits for depression related to agentic and external control

Depression has been linked to weakened perceptions of control. The experimental evidence derives from tasks with exposure to stable action-outcome contingencies. One assumption has been that performance represents a general cognitive bias that might manifest itself by a global performance difference. Another view is that people have specific situational perceptions of control reflecting their recent actions and the contingencies to which they are currently experiencing. In an experiment with N = 179, participants acquired one of four action-outcome sequences (Constant or Variable). We measured how learning was reflected in ratings of control and probability of responding in relation to mood. In three experimental treatments, the overall contingency across training involved an average moderate degree of control (ΔP = 0.25), but differed in how control varied (Constant or one of two Variable treatments). A fourth, control treatment involved a Constant zero degree of control (ΔP = 0.00). Participants rated their control before, during and after each sequence, providing measures of pre-existing bias, ratings of control in specific situations and generalised control perceptions. Specific control ratings were only influenced by the contingency experience and not pre-existing bias. Higher scores on the Beck’s depression inventory were associated with weakened association between action and context ratings. Overall, these data suggest that human agency is related to rates of responding and that mood is related to a difference in sensitivity to the ratings of and responding to the context.

The goal bias revisited: A collostructional approach

Abstract There is a goal bias in the description of motion events: adverbials specifying goals are preferred over adverbials specifying source. Two broad explanations have been suggested to account for this: first, a general cognitive bias towards the aims of human actions, and second, the higher information value of goal adverbials in conceptualizing a motion event in its entirety. The second explanation predicts that the goal bias should be verb-specific. In particular, verbs whose lexical semantics focus on trajectories or sources of motion events (such as stroll and escape respectively), should not display a goal bias but instead prefer adverbials corresponding to this focus. Stefanowitsch and Rohde (2004) present case studies of ten English motion verbs that confirm this prediction. The current study takes up this research and complements it with a collostructional analysis over a large sample of 248 English motion verbs. The study shows, first, that goal adverbials dominate among strongly-associated pairs of motion verbs and prepositions in the English Intransitive Motion Construction, confirming a general goal bias for this construction; and second, that while goal adverbials are significantly associated with generic motion verbs as well as motion verbs specifying trajectories, trajectory adverbials and goal adverbials are significantly associated with trajectory- and goal-oriented verbs respectively, adding largescale quantitative confirmation to the previous study.

Speaker-specific processing of anomalous utterances.

Existing work shows that readers often interpret grammatical errors (e.g., The key to the cabinets *were shiny) and sentence-level blends ("without-blend": Claudia left without her headphones *off) in a non-literal fashion, inferring that a more frequent or more canonical utterance was intended instead. This work examines how interlocutor identity affects the processing and interpretation of anomalous sentences. We presented anomalies in the context of "emails" attributed to various writers in a self-paced reading paradigm and used comprehension questions to probe how sentence interpretation changed based upon properties of the item and properties of the "speaker." Experiment 1 compared standardised American English speakers to L2 English speakers; Experiment 2 compared the same standardised English speakers to speakers of a non-Standardised American English dialect. Agreement errors and without-blends both led to more non-literal responses than comparable canonical items. For agreement errors, more non-literal interpretations also occurred when sentences were attributed to speakers of Standardised American English than either non-Standardised group. These data suggest that understanding sentences relies on expectations and heuristics about which utterances are likely. These are based upon experience with language, with speaker-specific differences, and upon more general cognitive biases.

Misperception of tiredness in young adults with insomnia.

People with insomnia often exhibit interpretive biases to cues associated with their condition. This study examined whether individuals with insomnia display an interpretive bias, such that they misperceive facial attributes of tiredness in a disorder-consistent manner. The efficacy of providing feedback related to the accuracy of participants' perception on later judgements of tiredness was further examined. Forty participants, 20 with DSM-5-defined insomnia disorder and 20 normal-sleepers, participated. The perception of one's own facial appearance of tiredness was assessed twice over two consecutive days using a visual task whereby participants indicated when a morphing image of their face represented their current level of tiredness. Visual and verbal feedback, related to participants' degree of misperception, was provided on completion of Day 1 testing. Overall, individuals with insomnia perceived their own face as significantly more tired than a baseline neutral photograph was, whereas normal-sleepers perceived themselves as appearing more alert. This pattern of results was only apparent on Day 1. Although no group×day interaction was established, mean scores suggest an improvement in perception on Day 2 amongst individuals with insomnia only. These findings suggest that individuals with insomnia exhibit a misperception of their facial attributes of tiredness, interpreting them in a disorder-consistent manner. This finding adds to the body of literature on cognitive models of insomnia, demonstrating more general cognitive biases in the disorder. Further, the results provide suggestive evidence that this misperception may be reformed.

Why Are We Reluctant to Act Immediately on Climate Change? From Ontological Assumptions to Core Cognition

Drawing on the findings from cognitive and developmental psychology, I argue that the wait-and-see approach to climate change originates from a misconception that heat is a material-like object. This ontological assumption exemplifies a general cognitive bias—we prefer to treat various ontological entities, including processes, as objects. The object bias is ultimately associated with our core cognition of objects, a system of representations that consists mainly of spatiotemporal information. To persuade people to act immediately on climate change, we need a special conceptual change to abandon the well-entrenched object bias and the related misconception of the nature of heat.

Why did this happen to me? Religious believers’ and non-believers’ teleological reasoning about life events

People often believe that significant life events happen for a reason. In three studies, we examined evidence for the view that teleological beliefs reflect a general cognitive bias to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that individual differences in mentalizing ability predicted both the tendency to believe in fate (Study 1) and to infer purposeful causes of one’s own life events (Study 2). In addition, people’s perception of purpose in life events was correlated with their teleological beliefs about nature, but this relationship was driven primarily by individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs (Study 3). Across all three studies, we found that while people who believe in God hold stronger teleological beliefs than those who do not, there is nonetheless evidence of teleological beliefs among non-believers, confirming that the perception of purpose in life events does not rely on theistic belief. These findings suggest that the tendency to perceive design and purpose in life events—while moderated by theistic belief—is not solely a consequence of culturally transmitted religious ideas. Rather, this teleological bias has its roots in certain more general social propensities.

The relationship between maternal attitudes and symptoms of depression and anxiety among pregnant and postpartum first-time mothers

Two studies examined the relationship between maternal attitudes and symptoms of depression and anxiety during pregnancy and the early postpartum period. In the first study, a measure of maternal attitudes, the Attitudes Toward Motherhood Scale (AToM), was developed and validated in a sample of first-time mothers. The AToM was found to have good internal reliability and convergent validity with cognitive biases and an existing measure of maternal attitudes. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses determined that the measure comprises three correlated factors: beliefs about others' judgments, beliefs about maternal responsibility, and maternal role idealization. In the second study, we used the AToM to assess the relationship between maternal attitudes and other psychological variables. The factor structure of the measure was confirmed. Maternal attitudes predicted symptoms of depression and anxiety, and these attitudes had incremental predictive validity over general cognitive biases and interpersonal risk factors. Overall, the results of these studies suggest that maternal attitudes are related to psychological distress among first-time mothers during the transition to parenthood and may provide a useful means of identifying women who may benefit from intervention during the perinatal period.

Language experience changes subsequent learning

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual non-linguistic (nonsense shapes), and auditory non-linguistic (pure tones). The forward and backward probabilities between adjacent elements generated two equally probable and orthogonal perceptual parses of the elements, such that any significant preference at test must be due to either general cognitive biases, or prior language-induced biases. We found that language modulated parsing preferences with the linguistic stimuli only. Intriguingly, these preferences are congruent with the dominant word order patterns of each language, as corroborated by corpus analyses, and are driven by probabilistic preferences. Furthermore, although the Korean individuals had received extensive formal explicit training in English and lived in an English-speaking environment, they exhibited statistical learning biases congruent with their native language. Our findings suggest that mechanisms of statistical sequential learning are implicated in language across the lifespan, and experience with language may affect cognitive processes and later learning.

Hypochondriacal attitudes may reflect a general cognitive bias that is not limited to illness-related thoughts

Previous findings suggested that hypochondriacal attitudes could originate from a pessimistic trait independent of illness-related thoughts. We hypothesised that hypochondriacal attitudes correlated with a general cognitive tendency towards negative interpretations and reduced familiarisation. Healthy non-patients were invited to participate. The sum score from the Hypochondriacal Beliefs and Disease Phobia scales of the Illness Attitude Scales assessed hypochondriacal attitudes. Participants without any knowledge of the Chinese language were asked to guess whether or not each of eight Chinese characters had a positive meaning and whether the characters appeared familiar. Stimuli without semantic content avoided a reference to illness in order to assess a general cognitive bias. Participants with high hypochondriasis scores rated apparently familiar stimuli as being less positive in comparison to low hypochondriacal participants, F(1,78) = 9.2, p = 0.003, η 2 = 0.10; correlation of hypochondriasis scores to the differences between ratings of familiar and unfamiliar characters: ρ = 0.345, p = 0.002. Positivity and familiarity ratings did not correlate with hypochondriacal attitudes independent of each other. A less positive appraisal of familiar experiences, which is unrelated to illness-related thoughts, may maintain hypochondriacal concerns. A general distrustful attitude towards familiar procedures should be considered in hypochondriasis.

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Recent findings (Keysar, 1994; Weingartner & Klin, 2005) have shown that readers are not always accurate at taking a story character's perspective. When readers evaluated a character's understanding of a written message, they mistakenly took into account information that was inaccessible to that character. The results from the three experiments reported here demonstrate that this “illusory transparency of intention” is not dependent on the message readers' communicative role: Even when the message was composed for one character but read by another, readers assumed that the message was understood as it was intended. The results are discussed in the context of two theoretical accounts for these perspective-taking errors: the “knowledge projection hypothesis,” which appeals to readers’ expectations about cooperative behavior during communication, and “construal,” which attributes the illusory transparency of intention to a general cognitive bias that occurs during the perception of ambiguous stimuli.

Cognitive processing in bipolar disorder conceptualized using the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) model

BackgroundThere are few theoretical proposals that attempt to account for the variation in affective processing across different affective states of bipolar disorder (BD). The Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) framework has been recently extended to account for manic states. Within the framework, positive mood state is hypothesized to tap into an implicational level of processing, which is proposed to be more extreme in states of mania.MethodThirty individuals with BD and 30 individuals with no history of affective disorder were tested in euthymic mood state and then in induced positive mood state using the Question–Answer task to examine the mode of processing of schemas. The task was designed to test whether individuals would detect discrepancies within the prevailing schemas of the sentences.ResultsAlthough the present study did not support the hypothesis that the groups differ in their ability to detect discrepancies within schemas, we did find that the BD group was significantly more likely than the control group to answer questions that were consistent with the prevailing schemas, both before and after mood induction.ConclusionsThese results may reflect a general cognitive bias, that individuals with BD have a tendency to operate at a more abstract level of representation. This may leave an individual prone to affective disturbance, although further research is required to replicate this finding.

Differential contributions of linguistic factors to memory-based ratings: Systematizing the systematic distortion hypothesis.

The systematic distortion hypothesis, which is based on a general cognitive bias contention for memory-based ratings of persons, does not account for functional differences between different types of linguistic form. A distinction between immediate terms (e.g., verbs, behaviors) and mediate terms (e.g., adjectives, traits) is offered. We argue that these linguistic forms fulfill different functions in the description of behaviors and persons. The hypothesis that the former terms differentiate features of persons in situations and are not affected by conceptual similarity, whereas the latter are primarily used to interpret persons and are organized by their conceptual relations, is supported in an experimental design in which we varied the type of target person orthogonally to type of situation. We show that whereas immediate terms differentiated for persons, situations, and persons in situations, their co-occurrence matrices are virtually unaffected by conceptual similarity. A strong conceptual similarity effect was found for mediate terms. Both sets of findings provide support for the functional distinction made between the two linguistic forms, and they suggest that the systematic effects produced for the systematic distortion hypothesis are a function of the types of terms rather than the product of a pervasive cognitive bias. The implications of the distinction between different linguistic forms for the person-situation debate and rating scale construction are discussed.