Mouse-tracking Paradigm Research Articles

Reflexive Activation of Monoracial Categories During Multiracial Categorization.

Previous research has examined the real-time cognitive processes underlying perceivers' ability to resolve racial ambiguity into monoracial categorizations, but such processes for multiracial categorizations are less clear. Using a novel, three-choice mouse-tracking paradigm, we found that when perceivers categorized faces as multiracial their hand movements revealed an initial attraction to a monoracial category (study 1). Moreover, exposure to multiracial individuals moderated these effects. When measured (Study 2) or manipulated (Study 3), multiracial exposure reduced monoracial category activation and activation occurred for both morphed and real multiracial faces (Study 4). Together, the findings suggest that multiracial categorizations emerge from dynamic competition between relatively more accessible monoracial categories and a less-accessible multiracial category, which is attenuated through greater exposure to multiracial targets. This research is the first to chart out the real-time dynamics underlying multiracial categorizations and offers a new theoretical account of this increasingly common form of social categorization.

The true self in reflections? Visual self‐recognition and the Big Five

AbstractTypically, individuals are motivated to see themselves in a flattering light regarding their physical and personality characteristics. We suggest that visual self‐perception is anchored in the true self which is largely the self‐enhancing self, and may also reflect the privileged access to one's traits and internal states. Here, we examine the impact and limits of self‐enhancement motivation and egocentric bias on individuals’ recognition of variations of their portraits in terms of the Big Five personality dimensions. We predict that individuals recognise themselves better in positively altered portraits, namely, portraits looking more agreeable, conscientious and open. We also predict that self‐enhancement is anchored in reality: Individuals recognise themselves less in strongly altered than in slightly or non‐altered portraits. In Study 1, we measure the directions of self‐recognition distortions by investigating in which random variations of their portraits individuals recognise themselves. In Study 2, relying on a mouse tracking paradigm, we additionally measure the degree of distortion, and the conflict individuals experience during the self‐recognition task. Results of both studies mainly demonstrate self‐recognition distortions towards agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness and neuroticism. Moreover, results from Study 2 reveal that self‐recognition is anchored in reality. Findings of two studies applying different methods convergently show systematic biases in self‐recognition regarding the Big Five dimensions, both enriching understanding of the self‐enhancement processes and demonstrating that the methods applied might be useful for future research focusing on self‐recognition.

When ethics also matter: Influence of taste, health, and ethical attributes on food decisions traced with a novel mouse-tracking paradigm

Understanding which food attributes influence food decisions is a matter of public health and a lever for interventions promoting healthy diets. Research shows that food decisions are strongly influenced by taste, with health having a weaker and later influence in the food decision process. Yet, the influence of other food attributes and specifically ethical attributes in food decision processes—as traceable in mouse-tracking data—has not been investigated. Furthermore, past research tracing food decision processes with classical mouse-tracking tools has artificially reduced the occurrence of neutral food items, particularly on the taste attribute. This represents an important limitation as neutral items on taste are particularly likely to be influenced by higher-order level attributes, such as health, but also ethics. Extending previous research, two preregistered studies (Study 1, N = 77; Study 2, N = 92) aimed at filling these gaps using a novel one-dimensional mouse-tracking paradigm. Results showed that taste, health, and ethics all influenced food decisions and interacted over time during decision processes. Taste still had the strongest influence, hence replicating previous findings with the present novel mouse-tracking paradigm. Of importance, ethics and health also influenced decisions—and sometimes had an early significant effect—especially for food items rated as neutral on taste. Beyond these effects and taking full advantage of the use of mixed effects models for all analyses, graphical representations of the influence of taste, health, and ethical attributes for all individual food items were provided. Results are discussed considering previous findings and suggested levers for interventions.

Bilingual Stroop Effect in High and Low Proficient Nepali-English Bilinguals

This research article presents experimental psycholinguistic study on high and low proficient Nepali – English bilingual adults. Language comprehension was measured using lexical decision tasks and language production was measured using verbal fluency task. Executive control was measured using bilingual Stroop task in mouse tracking paradigm. The results show high proficient bilinguals show the bilingual advantage in language comprehension, language production and executive control tasks.

The Effects of Intent, Outcome, and Causality on Moral Judgments and Decision Processes.

Over the past decade, moral judgments and their underlying decision processes have more frequently been considered from a dynamic and multi-factorial perspective rather than a binary approach (e.g., dual-system processes). The agent’s intent and his or her causal role in the outcome–as well as the outcome importance–are key psychological factors that influence moral decisions, especially judgments of punishment. The current research aimed to study the influence of intent, outcome, and causality variations on moral decisions, and to identify their interaction during the decision process by embedding the moral scenarios within an adapted mouse-tracking paradigm. Findings of the preregistered study (final n = 80) revealed main effects for intent, outcome, and causality on judgments of punishment, and an interaction between the effects of intent and causality. We furthermore explored the dynamics of these effects during the decision process via the analysis of mouse trajectories in the course of time. It allowed detecting when these factors intervened during the trial time course. The present findings thus both replicate and extend previous research on moral judgment, and evidence that, despite some ongoing challenges, mouse-tracking represents a promising tool to investigate moral decision-making.

Gender stereotypes drive perceptual differences of vocal confidence.

One's ability to express confidence is critical to achieve one's goals in a social context-such as commanding respect from others, establishing higher social status, and persuading others. How individuals perceive confidence may be shaped by the socio-indexical cues produced by the speaker. In the current production/perception study, we asked four speakers (two cisgender women/men) to answer trivia questions under three speaking contexts: natural, overconfident, and underconfident (i.e., lack of confidence). An evaluation of the speakers' acoustics indicated that the speakers significantly varied their acoustic cues as a function of speaking context and that the women and men had significantly different acoustic cues. The speakers' answers to the trivia questions in the three contexts (natural, overconfident, underconfident) were then presented to listeners (N = 26) in a social judgment task using a computer mouse-tracking paradigm. Listeners were sensitive to the speakers' acoustic modulations of confidence and differentially interpreted these cues based on the perceived gender of the speaker, thereby impacting listeners' cognition and social decision making. We consider, then, how listeners' social judgments about confidence were impacted by gender stereotypes about women and men from social, heuristic-based processes.

Rational use of cognitive resources in human planning.

Making good decisions requires thinking ahead, but the huge number of actions and outcomes one could consider makes exhaustive planning infeasible for computationally constrained agents, such as humans. How people are nevertheless able to solve novel problems when their actions have long-reaching consequences is thus a long-standing question in cognitive science. To address this question, we propose a model of resource-constrained planning that allows us to derive optimal planning strategies. We find that previously proposed heuristics such as best-first search are near optimal under some circumstances but not others. In a mouse-tracking paradigm, we show that people adapt their planning strategies accordingly, planning in a manner that is broadly consistent with the optimal model but not with any single heuristic model. We also find systematic deviations from the optimal model that might result from additional cognitive constraints that are yet to be uncovered.

Influences of First and Second Language Phonology on Spanish Children Learning to Read in English.

Children learning to read in two different orthographic systems are exposed to cross-linguistic interferences. We explored the effects of school (Monolingual, Bilingual) and grade (2nd, 4th, and 6th) on phonological activation during a visual word recognition task. Elementary school children from Spain completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real words and pseudohomophones following Spanish or English phonological rules. Using the mouse-tracking paradigm, we analyzed errors, reaction times, and computer mouse movements. Children in the bilingual school performed better than children in the monolingual school. Children in higher grades performed better than children in lower grades. The interference effect of Spanish phonology was weak and became weaker in higher grades. Spanish children differentiate between first and second language grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences since early on in the educational process. In 6th grade, children from the bilingual school responded better to words and Spanish pseudohomophones, while children from the monolingual school were less distracted by the English pseudohomophones. Children in the bilingual school had stronger inhibition of Spanish (L1) phonology and stronger activation of English (L2) phonology. Instructional method plays an important role on the processing strategies Spanish children rely on when reading in English. School and grade influence the link between orthographic and phonological representations.

The Specificity and Reliability of Conflict Adaptation: A Mouse-Tracking Study

Researchers have recently begun to question the specificity and reliability of conflict adaptation effects, also known as sequential congruency effects (SCEs), a highly cited effect in cognitive psychology. Some have even used the lack of reliability across tasks (e.g., Flanker, and Stroop) to argue against models of cognitive control that have dominated the field for decades. The present study tested the possibility that domain-general processes across tasks might appear on more sensitive mouse-tracking metrics rather than overall reaction times. The relationship between SCE effects on the Stroop and Flanker tasks were examined for the first time using a mouse-tracking paradigm. Three main findings emerged: (1) Robust SCEs were observed for both the Stroop and Flanker tasks at the group level, (2) Within-task split-half reliabilities for the SCE across dependent variables were weak at best and non-existent in many cases, and (3) SCEs for the Flanker and Stroop tasks did not correlate with each other for overall reaction times, but did show significant correlations between tasks on more dynamic measures that captured processes before response execution. These findings contribute to the literature by highlighting how mouse-tracking may be a fruitful avenue by which future studies can examine the specificity and reliability of conflict adaptation and tease apart different theoretical models producing the effects.

Exploring task switch costs in a color-shape decision task via a mouse tracking paradigm.

Several decades of cognitive research have explored the processes and mechanisms that underlie task switching. Here we report an experiment in which young adult participants were presented with colored shapes, and were randomly cued to categorize them according to color, or to shape. Responses were made via dynamic movements of the computer mouse ("mouse tracking"), which allows insight into how decision making unfolds. The results showed that a range of classic findings (mix cost, switch cost, task congruency effects, etc.) emerged strongly in movement trajectories. Initiation of movements was sensitive to task/cue driven but not to stimulus/response driven variables, as well as to task switching. This constellation suggests that task switch costs emerge as a combination of task set reconfiguration, and stimulus-driven sensory-motor mappings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Exploring Task Switch Costs in a Color-Shape Decision Task via a Mouse Tracking Paradigm

Supplemental Material for Exploring Task Switch Costs in a Color-Shape Decision Task via a Mouse Tracking Paradigm

Contextualized Knowledge Reduces Misconceived COVID-19 Health Decisions

How do we resolve conflicting ideas about how to protect our health during a pandemic? Prior knowledge influences our decisions, potentially creating implicit cognitive conflict with new, correct information. COVID-19 provides a natural condition for investigating how an individual’s health-specific knowledge (e.g., understanding mask efficacy) and their personal context (e.g., outbreak proximity) influence their protective health behavior endorsement, as information about the virus, its spread, and lethality has changed over time. Using a dual-process-model framework, we investigated the role cognitive conflict has on health decision-making. We used a computer mouse-tracking paradigm alongside geographical information systems (GIS) as a proxy for context. The results support a contextualized-deficit-model framework in which relevant knowledge and context-based factors help individuals override cognitive conflict to make more preventative health decisions. Findings from this study may provide evidence for a more effective way for experts to combat non-adherence due to conflicting health information.

Does English orthography influence bilingual Spanish readers? The effect of grapheme crosslinguistic congruency and complexity on letter detection

Phonemic correspondences for a particular grapheme are not always congruent across languages. Also, some complex graphemes can be found in some languages but not in others. The purpose of this study is to determine if the congruency and complexity of English graphemes influence letter detection in L2 learners. We further investigated whether age group (7-, 9- and 11-year-old children, and university undergraduates) determines the size of these effects. Participants completed two different letter detection tasks using the mouse-tracking paradigm. Results from Experiment 1 indicate that only younger children are slightly affected by incongruent graphemes. Results from Experiment 2 show that all readers perform worse with complex graphemes. L2 learners interiorize English phonology at early stages, being barely affected by their native Spanish language. Importantly, L2 learners decode complex graphemes similarly to native English readers. Interpretations based on the BIA-d model are discussed.

Perception of Multi-Cue Indexical Speech Leads to Amplified Stereotyping

ABSTRACT Negative appraisals may stem from the identification of a social mismatch (i.e., expectation violation) of cues assumed by in-group characteristics, with out-group persons perceived more negatively. Few studies have focused on the compounding effects of multi-factor out-group socio-vocal cues that indexically mark social appraisals, potentially leading to reliance on stereotypes and thus heightened social stigmatization. A matched-guise technique was used to create two vocal socio-indexical cues to speaker identity (out-group accent; stuttering) that may independently garner negative social appraisal, increasing the likelihood of social stigmatization when they occur together. Digitally manipulated stuttered speech from two U.S. American accented male speakers (Northern; Southern) was presented to typically fluent U.S. Northern (USN) accented listeners in a computer mouse-tracking paradigm. Results indicated that while both accented speakers who had a pseudo-stutter were perceived negatively, the USN listeners tended to perceive the speaker with multiple out-group vocal cues (pSWS – U.S. Southern accented speaker who pseudo-stutters) more negatively relative to the speaker with one in-group and one out-group cue (pNWS – U.S. Northern accented speaker who pseudo-stutters). Findings suggest that individuals with multiple socio-indexical out-group cues may experience amplified negative appraisals through compounding effects of socio-indexical cue perception, which could lead to amplified stereotypes and discrimination in real-world contexts.

Social Judgments of Digitally Manipulated Stuttered Speech: Cognitive Heuristics Drive Implicit and Explicit Bias.

Purpose People who stutter are susceptible to discrimination, stemming from negative stereotypes and social misattributions. There has been a recent push to evaluate the underlying explicit and implicit cognitive mechanisms associated with social judgments, moving away from only evaluating explicit social bias about people who stutter. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate how listeners change their implicit and explicit social (mis)attributions after hearing a people who stutter produce disfluent speech. Method The current project was an adaptation of the Byrd et al. (2017) study to evaluate listener implicit/explicit social judgments of stuttered speech across five categories (i.e., confidence, friendliness, intelligence, distractibility, and extroversion) before and after a stuttering self-disclosure. This was done by implementing a modified version of the Ferguson et al. (2019) computer mouse-tracking paradigm. Results Consistent with previous findings, participants made more explicit positive social judgments of confidence, friendliness, extroversion, and intelligence after a stuttering self-disclosure, but the distractedness category was resistant to change. Also consistent with previous findings, participants experienced a higher degree of cognitive competition (i.e., higher area under the curve) shortly after self-disclosure, which lessened over time. Conclusions Explicit and implicit biases exist, but self-disclosure significantly impacts the cognitive system of listeners. Specifically, self-disclosure may reduce explicit bias through experience and explicit belief updating, but when cognitive heuristics are strong, implicit bias may be slower to change.

A Review of Mouse-Tracking Applications in Economic Studies

Since mouse-tracking paradigm came under the spotlight two decades ago, by providing mouse cursor trajectories, it has been applied by behavioral scientists to a variety of topics to help understand real-time psychological state when people are faced with multiple choices. In this article, we provide a comprehensive, documentation of experimental economics studies with mouse-tracking paradigm. Among these studies, some focus on measuring choice uncertainty including subject uncertainty, temporal uncertainty, and probabilistic uncertainty; the rest are concerned with economic games including bargaining games and social dilemma games. Why and how these works employ mouse-tracking technique in their experiments is elaborated in detail. Finally, limitations of mouse-tracking paradigm are discussed, and research opportunities are proposed. Basic know-hows are appended as a general guide for interested readers.

Negation Polarizes Agreement Dynamics During Sentence Comprehension

Abstract In a forced-choice mouse-tracking paradigm, true and false statements (ranging from very true, to ambiguous, to very false) were tested in both affirmative and negated forms. Replicating prior research, mouse trajectories reveal subtle differences in a continuum of true to false statements. However, negation modifies this process, particularly for very true statements (i.e. Bread is not made from sand). The mouse trajectories were more curved with negated sentences, with end-points of the continuum of truth (very true and very false statements) having the greatest area under the curve. The proposed explanation is the pragmatic meaning of a negated statement such as “Gummie bears are not alive” is infelicitous, whereas a true statement “People live on Earth” is felicitous. This study reveals the online dynamics of processing these statements and possible confusion, particularly when very true statements contain a negation.

I Scream for Ice Cream: Resolving Lexical Ambiguity with Sub-phonemic Information.

This study uses a response mouse-tracking paradigm to examine the role of sub-phonemic information in online lexical ambiguity resolution of continuous speech. We examine listeners' sensitivity to the sub-phonemic information that is specific to the ambiguous internal open juncture /s/-stop sequences in American English (e.g., "place kin" vs. "play skin"), that is, voice onset time (VOT) indicating different degrees of aspiration (e.g., long VOT for "kin" vs. short VOT for "skin") in connected speech contexts. A cross-splicing method was used to create two-word sequences (e.g., "place kin" or "play skin") with matching VOTs (long for "kin"; short for "skin") or mismatching VOTs (short for "kin"; long for "skin"). Participants (n = 20) heard the two-word sequences, while looking at computer displays with the second word in the left/right corner ("KIN" and "SKIN"). Then, listeners' click responses and mouse movement trajectories were recorded. Click responses show significant effects of VOT manipulation, while mouse trajectories do not. Our results show that stop-release information, whether temporal or spectral, can (mis)guide listeners' interpretation of the possible location of a word boundary between /s/ and a following stop, even when other aspects in the acoustic signal (e.g., duration of /s/) point to the alternative segmentation. Taken together, our results suggest that segmentation and lexical access are highly attuned to bottom-up phonetic information; our results have implications for a model of spoken language recognition with position-specific representations available at the prelexical level and also allude to the possibility that detailed phonetic information may be stored in the listeners' lexicons.

Design factors in mouse-tracking: What makes a difference?

Investigating cognitive processes by analyzing mouse movements has become a popular method in many psychological disciplines. When creating mouse-tracking experiments, researchers face many design choices-for example, whether participants indicate responses by clicking a button or just by entering the button area. Hitherto, numerous different settings have been employed, but little is known about how these methodological differences affect mouse-tracking data. We systematically investigated the influences of three central design factors, using a classic mouse-tracking paradigm in which participants classified typical and atypical exemplars. In separate experiments, we manipulated the response indication, mouse sensitivity, and starting procedure. The core finding that mouse movements deviate more toward the nonchosen option for atypical exemplars was replicated in all conditions. However, the size of this effect varied. Specifically, it was larger when participants indicated responses via click and when they were instructed to initialize the movement early. Trajectory shapes also differed between setups. For example, a dynamic start led to mostly curved trajectories, responses via click led to a mix of straight and "change-of-mind" trajectories, and responses via touch led to mostly straight trajectories. Moreover, the distribution of curvature indices was classified as bimodal in some setups and as unimodal in others. Because trajectory curvature and shape are frequently used to make inferences about psychological theories, such as differentiating between dynamic and dual-system models, this study shows that the specific design must be carefully considered when drawing theoretical inferences. All methodological designs and analyses were implemented using open-source software and are available from https://osf.io/xdp7a/.

Bilinguals as “experts”? Comparing performance of mono- to bilingual individuals via a mousetracking paradigm

The question of whether bilingualism conveys a broader advantage in executive functions has recently been controversially discussed, with the empirical findings presenting a complex pattern of positive and null results. Here we present results from three standard tasks measuring executive functions (Flanker; Simon; Spatial Stroop) in which we compared performance of English monolingual to Chinese–English bilingual young adults. Participants provided responses via movement of a computer mouse rather than the conventional key presses, which provides a rich signal of the unfolding response dynamics. Clear differences between bi- and monolinguals emerged, with the former providing more ‘efficient’ responses than the latter. Results are discussed regarding the extent to which these results can be characterised as a genuine “bilingual advantage”.