Cue Validity Research Articles

The role of children's metacognitive experiences for cue utilization and monitoring accuracy: A longitudinal study.

Although the literature consistently documents strong improvements in metacognitive skills over the elementary school years, relatively little is known about the mechanisms fueling these developments. One factor that is being discussed in the literature and targeted in the present approach is cue utilization. Cue utilization quantifies the degree to which an individual uses mnemonic experiences during task mastery to inform monitoring processes. In the present study, retrieval fluency as a valid and ubiquitous cue during recognition was assessed by recording children's choice latencies in a recognition test and by relating these to confidence ratings. A sample of second graders and fourth graders was assessed 3 times over one year in terms of their recognition performance, the time needed to select an alternative, and their monitoring accuracy. Results revealed age differences in monitoring accuracy, cue utilization, and cue validity. Moreover, while monitoring accuracy increased over time in both age groups, cue utilization increased only in the younger children. Analyses were completed by an individual differences approach showing that cue utilization is a factor driving recognition improvements over time, underlining the importance of metacognitive experiences for development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Airport artificial intelligence can detect deception: or am i lying?

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, research has enveloped numerous areas within the psychological sciences as a means to increase the ability to spot potential threats. While airports took to heightened security protocols, many academics looked deeper into ways of detecting deception within international airport settings. Various verbal and nonverbal systems were intensely scrutinised under the empirical magnifying glass with the aim of creating security environments that are better able to detect potential threats. However, in 2018, a €4.5 m grant from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, number 700,626, was awarded to further in vivo test the use of computational methods to detect deception from facial cues. The system is deemed a noninvasive psychological profiling system and stems from that of a system called ‘Silent Talker’ (Rothwell et al. in Appl Cognit Psychol 20(6):757–777, 2006). The ‘iBorderCtrl’ AI system uses a variety of ‘at home’ pre-registration systems and real time ‘at the airport’ automatic deception detection systems. Some of the critical methods used in automated deception detection are that of micro-expressions. In this opinion article, we argue that considering the state of the psychological sciences current understanding of micro-expressions and their associations with deception, such in vivo testing is naive and misinformed. We consider the lack of empirical research that supports the use of micro-expressions in the detection of deception and question the current understanding of the validity of specific cues to deception. With such unclear definitive and reliable cues to deception, we question the validity of using artificial intelligence that includes cues to deception, which have no current empirical support.

Appearance-based trust processing in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired social interactions and altered trust. In the general population, trust is often based on facial appearance, with limited validity but enormous social consequences. The aim was to examine trust processing in schizophrenia and specifically to examine how people with schizophrenia use facial appearance as well as actual partner fairness to guide trusting decisions. An experimental economic game study. Here, we tested how patients with schizophrenia and control participants (each N=24) use facial trustworthiness appearance and partner fairness behaviour to guide decisions in a multi-round Trust Game. In the Trust Game, participants lent money to 'partners' whose facial appearance was either untrustworthy or trustworthy, and who either played fairly or unfairly. Clinical symptoms were measured as well as explicit trustworthiness impressions. Overall, the patients with schizophrenia showed unimpaired explicit facial trustworthiness impressions and unimpaired facial appearance biases in the Trust Game. Crucially, patients and controls significantly differed so that the patients with schizophrenia did not learn to discriminate in the Trust Game based on actual partner fairness, unlike control participants. A failure to discriminate trust has important implications for everyday functioning in schizophrenia, as forming accurate trustworthiness beliefs is an essential social skill. Critically, without relying on more valid trust cues, people with schizophrenia may be especially susceptible to the misleading effect of appearance when making trusting decisions. Findings People with schizophrenia made very similar facial trustworthiness impressions to healthy controls and also used facial appearance to guide trust decisions similarly to controls. However, the patient group were less able to explicitly distinguish between fair and unfair partners based on their behaviour compared with the control group. Moreover, people with schizophrenia failed to use actual partner fairness to guide their financial decisions in the Trust Game, unlike controls, and this impairment was specific to a social task. People with schizophrenia may be particularly reliant on facial appearance when trusting others, as they may struggle to incorporate more valid trustworthiness information in their decision-making, such as actual partner fairness.

Self-presentation and impressions of personality through text-based online dating profiles: A lens model analysis

In online dating, the self-authored profile serves as the primary way for daters to introduce themselves to others and to learn more about potential partners. However, few studies have examined the extent to which daters’ self-authored profile content is consistent with the impressions that others actually form. This study applied the Brunswikian lens model (1956) to examine self-presentation and impression formation in the text-based “about me” portion of the online dating profile. Using the meaning extraction method, we analyzed 190 profiles. Consistent with the lexical approach to personality, daters were able to encode aspects of themselves through linguistic self-description (cue validity), and observers were able to decode profile information to form impressions (cue utilization). However, there were few significant associations between a dater’s self-presentation and observers’ judgments (functional achievement). Findings are interpreted in line with previous work examining self-presentation and impressions in online dating profiles.

Different visual and auditory latencies affect cross-modal non-spatial repetition inhibition

The present study examined the effect of different latencies for processing visual and auditory stimuli in cross-modal non-spatial repetition inhibition. In two experiments, the cue validity of modality and identity between the prime and the target was manipulated in a “prime-neutral cue-target” paradigm. A distinct neutral event was presented after the prime and before the onset of the target. The prime probe was visual in Experiment 1 and auditory in Experiment 2. The results in both experiments showed that RTs for identity-cued trials were significantly slower than RTs for identity-cued trials regardless of whether the modality of the target was visual or auditory. In addition, RTs for visual trials were significantly faster than RTs for auditory trials, indicating different latencies of processing visual and auditory stimuli. This latency difference affects cross-modal non-spatial repetition inhibition in two aspects: 1) creating a new representation (identity uncued) that is delivered via visual modality is easier under audio-visual conditions, and 2) retrieving an inhibited representation (identity cued) that is delivered via auditory modality is more difficult under visual-audio conditions. We propose that cross-modal non-spatial repetition inhibition, which is distinct from unimodal repetition inhibition, can be easily influenced by different latencies of processing visual and auditory stimuli.

Let's Do The Fracking Talk: An Experimental Approach To Understanding Legitimacy Perceptions

The literature on legitimacy has established that to form legitimacy judgments, individual evaluators process two perceptual inputs. They interpret the behavior of the entity under scrutiny and benchmark it to their personal sets of norms, values, and beliefs, and they interpret the judgments of legitimacy awarding institutions through the validity cues that these institutions convey. Building on the literatures on legitimacy perception, on independence and pro-environmental values, we offer an evaluation model of legitimacy judgment formation and test this model on 5,928 assessments about the use of a new technology of fracking made by 247 observers. We find that variance in legitimacy evaluations depends both on the validity cues from legitimacy awarding institutions, on evaluators’ basic values, and the interaction between the two. Specifically, we observe that four validity cues - public support, economic impact, regulations, and longevity - are used simultaneously and have significant effects on the legitimacy judgment but also that regulations bolster the effects of the other cues. Lastly, we find that differences in evaluators’ basic values moderate the effect of the validity cues on legitimacy judgments. Particularly, higher pro-environmental values of evaluators suggest less favorable perceptions of high economic impact; higher pro-environmental values suggest more favorable perceptions when public support is high. Intriguingly, the higher the pro-environmental values as well as the higher the level of independence, an established venture is perceived as more legitimate than a new venture.

Fractionating the stare-in-the-crowd effect: Two distinct, obligatory biases in search for gaze.

Direct gaze-someone gazing at you-is an important social cue that might be expected to capture visual attention, even in the presence of other faces. Consistent with this, direct gazing eyes are often detected more rapidly in arrays of averted gazing eyes, than vice versa; a search asymmetry termed the stare-in-the-crowd effect (SITCE). Here, we examine top-down influences on the SITCE by manipulating observers' knowledge of the target's gaze prior to the search display. Our findings revealed two dissociable components of the SITCE. The first, which scaled with set size but was unaffected by prior knowledge, was attributed to noisy, parallel gaze processing that guides attention toward direct gaze (Process 1). The second, an overall response time advantage for direct versus averted gaze targets, irrespective of set size, was attributed to criteria for determining target presence versus absence (Process 2). Prior knowledge of the target's gaze direction increased the direct gaze advantage, rather than speeding up responses for both target types (typically expected for 100% valid cues). This unusual pattern suggests that top-down gaze-related influences may comprise an obligatory bias toward direct gaze. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A comparison of the effectiveness of two types of deceit detection training methods in older adults

BackgroundIn general, people are poor at detecting deception. Older adults are even worse than young adults at detecting deceit, which might make them uniquely vulnerable to certain types of financial fraud. One reason for poor deceit detection abilities is that lay theories of cues to deception are not valid. This study compared the effectiveness of two training methods to improve deceit detection among older adults: valid facial cues versus valid verbal cues to deception. Approximately 150 older adults were randomly assigned to facial training, verbal training, or a control condition. Participants completed a pre-test deceit detection task, their assigned training, and a post-test deceit detection task.ResultsBoth training groups significantly improved at recognizing their respectively trained cues after training. However, the facial cue training group were less accurate at detecting deception post-test compared to pre-test and the control group exhibited improved accuracy of deceit detection from pre-test to post-test.ConclusionsThese results are consistent with the body of literature on deception suggesting people hover around chance accuracy, even after training. Older adults’ facial and verbal cue recognition can be improved with training, but these improvements did not translate into more accurate deceit detection, and actually hampered performance in the facial condition. Older adults showed the most benefit from sheer practice at detecting deception (in the control condition), perhaps because this condition encouraged implicit rather than explicit judgments of deception.

Causal Evidence for Expression of Perceptual Expectations in Category-Selective Extrastriate Regions

Expectations about a visual event shape the way it is perceived [1-4]. For example, expectations induced by valid cues signaling aspects of a visual target can improve judgments about that target, relative to invalid cues [5, 6]. Such expectation effects are thought to arise via pre-activation of a template in neural populations that represent the target [7, 8] in early sensory areas [9] or in higher-level regions. For example, category cues ("face" or "house") modulate pre-target fMRI activity in associated category-selective brain regions [10, 11]. Further, a relationship is sometimes found between the strength of template activity and success in perceptual tasks on the target [12-14]. However, causal evidence linking pre-target activity with expectation effects is lacking. Here we provide such evidence, using fMRI-guided online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In two experiments, human volunteers made binary judgments about images of either a body or a scene. Before each target image, a verbal cue validly or invalidly indicated a property of the image, thus creating perceptual expectations about it. To disrupt these expectations, we stimulated category-selective visual brain regions (extrastriate body area, EBA; occipital place area, OPA) during the presentation of the cue. Stimulation ended before the target images appeared. We found a double dissociation: TMS to EBA during the cue period removed validity effects only in the body task, whereas stimulating OPA removed validity effects only in the scene task. Perceptual expectations are expressed by the selective activation of relevant populations within brain regions that encode the target.

Sensory and decisional components of endogenous attention are dissociable.

Endogenous cueing of attention enhances sensory processing of the attended stimulus (perceptual sensitivity) and prioritizes information from the attended location for guiding behavioral decisions (spatial choice bias). Here, we test whether sensitivity and bias effects of endogenous spatial attention are under the control of common or distinct mechanisms. Human observers performed a multialternative visuospatial attention task with probabilistic spatial cues. Observers’ behavioral choices were analyzed with a recently developed multidimensional signal detection model (the m-ADC model). The model effectively decoupled the effects of spatial cueing on sensitivity from those on spatial bias and revealed striking dissociations between them. Sensitivity was highest at the cued location and not significantly different among uncued locations, suggesting a spotlight-like allocation of sensory resources at the cued location. On the other hand, bias varied systematically with cue validity, suggesting a graded allocation of decisional priority across locations. Cueing-induced modulations of sensitivity and bias were uncorrelated within and across subjects. Bias, but not sensitivity, correlated with key metrics of prioritized decision-making, including reaction times and decision optimality indices. In addition, we developed a novel metric, differential risk curvature, for distinguishing bias effects of attention from those of signal expectation. Differential risk curvature correlated selectively with m-ADC model estimates of bias but not with estimates of sensitivity. Our results reveal dissociable effects of endogenous attention on perceptual sensitivity and choice bias in a multialternative choice task and motivate the search for the distinct neural correlates of each.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Attention is often studied as a unitary phenomenon. Yet, attention can both enhance the perception of important stimuli (sensitivity) and prioritize such stimuli for decision-making (bias). Employing a multialternative spatial attention task with probabilistic cueing, we show that attention affects sensitivity and bias through dissociable mechanisms. Specifically, the effects on sensitivity alone match the notion of an attentional “spotlight.” Our behavioral model enables quantifying component processes of attention, and identifying their respective neural correlates.

The Effect of Emotional Arousal on Inhibition of Return Among Youth With Depressive Tendency.

The occurrence and development of depressive symptoms were thought to be closely related to excessive attention to negative information. However, the evidences among researchers were inconsistent on whether negative emotional information could induce attention bias in depressed individuals. One possible hypothesis is that the arousal level of stimuli regulates the attention bias of depressed individuals to negative emotional stimuli. In the current study, we directly assessed the attentional inhibition of depression-tendency individuals to different arousal levels of negative emotional faces. The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was used to distinguish the depression-tendency group from the health group. Thirty-three participants in each group completed a simpler cue-target task that comprised four kinds of experimental conditions, in which group was an inter-subject variable, while cue validity, arousal level, and stimulus onset asynchrony were internal variables. By subtracting the reaction time under the valid cue from the reaction time under the invalid cue, we got the magnitudes of inhibition of return (IOR), which reflected the effective suppression of previously noticed irrelevant information. We found that, in health group, the IOR effect was smaller at high arousal level than at low arousal level. This means that even in the normal population, higher arousal level of negative emotional information could weaken the individual’s attention inhibition ability. While in the depression-tendency group, the IOR effect only appeared at low arousal level condition, but in the high cue condition it showed the reversal pattern, that was, the cue effect. These results indicated for the first time that the attention bias of depressive individuals to negative emotional stimuli was influenced by the arousal level of stimuli, and the negative stimuli with high arousal level were more difficult to suppress.

Examining Factors Influencing Use of a Decision Aid in Personnel Selection

In this research, two studies were conducted to examine factors influencing reliance on a decision aid in personnel selection. Specifically, this study examined the effect of feedback, validity of selection predictors, and presence of a decision aid on the use of the aid in personnel selection. The results demonstrate that when people are provided with the decision aid, their predictions were significantly more similar to the predictions made by the aid than people who were not provided with the aid. This suggests that when people are provided with an aid, they will use it to some degree. This research also shows that when provided with a decision aid with high cue validity, people will increase their reliance on the decision aid over multiple decisions.

Reassessing the good judge of personality.

Are some people truly better able to accurately perceive the personality of others? Previous research suggests that the good judge may be of little practical importance and individual differences minimal. In four large samples we assessed whether expressive accuracy (the good target) is a necessary condition for perceptive accuracy (the good judge) to emerge. As predicted from Funder's (1995) realistic accuracy model, assessments of the good judge predicted increased impression accuracy in the context of judgments of the good target. In contrast, evaluative tendencies for judges did not evidence a similar interaction; the positivity of impressions did not reliably increase as a function of how positively targets tend to be viewed. The present results suggest the good judge does indeed exist-some individuals are much better able to detect and utilize valid cues from targets-but this is only strongly evident when perceiving a good target. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Skin Color Preferences in a Malaysian Chinese Population.

Facial skin color influences the perceived health and attractiveness of Caucasian faces, and has been proposed as a valid cue to aspects of physiological health. Similar preferences for skin color have previously been found in African participants, while different preferences have been found among mainland Chinese participants. Here, we asked Malaysian Chinese participants (ethnic Chinese living in an Asian country with high levels of exposure to Western culture) to manipulate the skin color of Malaysian Chinese, Caucasian, and African faces to make them “look as healthy as possible.” Participants chose to increase skin yellowness to a greater extent than to increase skin redness to optimize healthy appearance. The slight reduction in skin lightness chosen was not statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. While broadly in line with the preferences of Caucasian and African participants from previous studies, this differs from mainland Chinese participants. There may be a role for culture in skin color preferences, though methodological differences mean that further research is necessary to identify the cause of these differences in preferences.

Invalidly cued targets are well localized when detected.

Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how objects are localized when there is ample time and attention to detect them. However, in the real world, we often must react to, or act upon, objects that we have glimpsed only briefly and are not directly at the focus of our attention. This paper describes two experiments examining the role of attentional constraints on 2-D (directional) localization, particularly in cases in which targets have been detected but are not within the spatial focus of attention. Targets were asterisks presented briefly (34-150 ms) above or below a central fixation point. Just prior to the target's appearance, a cue directed attention toward, or away from, the target. Participants indicated whether or not they saw the target, and then used a mouse to indicate the target's location. The impact of guessing was mitigated by removing trials that participants had flagged as not detected. Longer glimpses generally benefitted localization; by contrast, cue validity had very little effect on response sensitivity, bias or precision. At very brief durations, invalid cueing did result in a small increase in foveal bias. These results indicate that the directional location of objects can be extracted reasonably well from brief glimpses even with reduced attention. This directional information provides an important basis for 3-D localization of objects on the ground, via their angular declination. The current studies suggest that egocentric distance perception might be similarly robust to reduced attention when localization is based primarily on a target's angular declination.

Reorganization of spatial configurations in visual working memory.

Human beings have to constantly process multiple objects in visual working memory (VWM). Positional relations to other objects known as spatial configurations contribute significantly to the organization of information in VWM. The aim of our study was to clarify whether spatial configurations can be reorganized to a subset of objects during maintenance. Participants were shown an array of objects, and afterwards the objects disappeared. A valid cue was shown either during encoding or maintenance to highlight the side of the following probed object. Afterwards, the objects reappeared and participants were instructed to detect whether or not a particular object changed its location. We manipulated the configurations at retrieval regarding the number of objects, ranging from all objects to a single object. Our first and second experiment investigated reorganization for a number of six and 12 objects, respectively. In the third experiment, we used a retro cue only and manipulated eye movements (free view vs. enforced fixation). While showing that reorganization of spatial configurations during maintenance is possible in principle, we found some boundary conditions. There was no spatial configuration effect when participants had to fixate. Thus, eye movements are required for a configuration effect to occur.

3D anthropometric assessment and perception of male body morphology in relation to physical strength.

The assessment of men's physical strength is an important part of human social perception, for which observers rely on different kinds of cues. However, besides previous studies being limited in considerable ways, as yet there is no comprehensive investigation of a range of somatometric measures in relation to both objectively measured and observer-perceived physical strength using valid stimuli. We examined observer-perceptions of physical strength from 3D body scans of n = 165 men, the usage and validity of somatometric measures as cues to strength, differences between strength ratings from stimuli presented on computer monitors vs in real-life size using a projector, and between male and female observers. A medium-sized correlation between measured and perceived strength was found, partly mediated by target men's chest-to-hip ratio, body density, ankle girth, height, upper arm, and forearm girth. No significant differences between men's and women's strength perceptions or the method of stimuli presentation (computer monitor vs projector) emerged. Our findings suggest that men's physical strength can be assessed with moderate accuracy from 3D body models and that some somatometric measures represent valid cues, which were used by observers, positively predicting both measured and perceived physical strength.

Attentional Weighting in the Face Processing Network: A Magnetic Response Image-guided Magnetoencephalography Study Using Multiple Cyclic Entrainments.

We recorded magnetoencephalography using a neural entrainment paradigm with compound face stimuli that allowed for entraining the processing of various parts of a face (eyes, mouth) as well as changes in facial identity. Our magnetic response image-guided magnetoencephalography analyses revealed that different subnodes of the human face processing network were entrained differentially according to their functional specialization. Whereas the occipital face area was most responsive to the rate at which face parts (e.g., the mouth) changed, and face patches in the STS were mostly entrained by rhythmic changes in the eye region, the fusiform face area was the only subregion that was strongly entrained by the rhythmic changes in facial identity. Furthermore, top-down attention to the mouth, eyes, or identity of the face selectively modulated the neural processing in the respective area (i.e., occipital face area, STS, or fusiform face area), resembling behavioral cue validity effects observed in the participants' RT and detection rate data. Our results show the attentional weighting of the visual processing of different aspects and dimensions of a single face object, at various stages of the involved visual processing hierarchy.

Validity expectancies shape the interplay of cueing and task demands during inhibitory control associated with right inferior frontal regions.

The neural mechanisms of inhibitory control have extensively been studied, including the effects of demands to engage in inhibitory control and the effects of valid and invalid cueing. Theoretical considerations, however, suggest that the aforementioned factors exert joined effects on response inhibition processes that are further modulated by the subject's experience about the reliability of cue stimuli during response inhibition processes. To examine the underlying neurophysiological processes of these interactive effects we combined EEG signal decomposition with sLORETA source localization. We show that response inhibition performance is modulated by interactive effects between (1) cue information/validity, (2) demands on inhibitory control processes and (3) the subject's experience that cue information is valid/invalid during response inhibition processes. Only if demands on inhibitory control processes are high and when participants acquainted the experience that cue information is very likely to be valid, invalid cue information compromised response inhibition performance. The neurophysiological data show that processes in the N2 time window, likely reflecting braking processes, but not stimulus-related processes during response inhibition, are modulated. It seems that braking processes cannot be sufficiently deployed if cue information that has been experienced to be highly valid turns out to be invalid in situations placing high demands on inhibitory control. Source localization data reveals that the interactive effects of the examined factors specifically modulate processes in the right inferior frontal gyrus (BA47). This provides electrophysiological evidence that the rIFG is a hub region integrating different factors modulating inhibitory control.

Credible accounts

This article examines research on cues to credibility, especially those within the content of what people say. It focuses both on valid cues and on the false beliefs that many people share about cues to truth/lies. Mention is made that liars try to appear truthful, and that some lawyers/advocates when cross-examining people try to make them seem like liars. What constitutes the good investigative questioning of people is then described, as is a recent recommendation of the United Nations.