Psychological Science

Previous studies have suggested that action constraints influence visual perception of distances. For instance, the greater the effort to cover a distance, the longer people perceive this distance to be. The present multilevel Bayesian meta-analysis (37 studies with 1,035 total participants) supported the existence of a small action-constraint effect on distance estimation, Hedges’s g = 0.29, 95% credible interval = [0.16, 0.47]. This effect varied slightly according to the action-constraint category (effort, weight, tool use) but not according to participants’ motor intention. Some authors have argued that such effects reflect experimental demand biases rather than genuine perceptual effects. Our meta-analysis did not allow us to dismiss this possibility, but it also did not support it. We provide field-specific conventions for interpreting action-constraint effect sizes and the minimum sample sizes required to detect them with various levels of power. We encourage researchers to help us update this meta-analysis by directly uploading their published or unpublished data to our online repository (https://osf.io/bc3wn/).

Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? We conducted two experiments (N = 403) to investigate this question. Experiment 1 showed that when people make simple semantic judgments on words, interference from a concurrent visual task scales in proportion to how much visual experience they have with the things the words refer to. Experiment 2 showed that when people make the same judgments on the very same words, interference from a concurrent manual task scales in proportion to how much manual (but critically, not visual) experience people have with those same things. These results suggest that the meanings of frequently visually experienced things are represented (in part) in the visual system used for actually seeing them, that this visually represented information is a functional part of conceptual knowledge, and that the extent of these visual representations is influenced by visual experience.

To avoid threats to the self, people shun comparisons with similar—yet immoral, mentally unstable, or otherwise negatively viewed—others. Despite this prevalent perspective, we consider a contrarian question: Can people be attracted to darker versions of themselves? We propose that with self-threat assuaged, similarity signals self-relevance, which draws people toward those who are similar to them despite negative characteristics. To test this general idea, we explored a prevalent context that may offer a safe haven from self-threat: stories. Using a large-scale proprietary data set from a company with over 232,000 registered users, we demonstrated that people have a preference for villains—unambiguously negative individuals—who are similar to themselves, which suggests that people are attracted to such comparisons in everyday life. Five subsequent lab experiments (N = 1,685) demonstrated when and why similarity results in attraction toward—rather than repulsion from—negative others.

People feel tired or depleted after exerting mental effort. But even preregistered studies often fail to find effects of exerting effort on behavioral performance in the laboratory or elucidate the underlying psychology. We tested a new paradigm in four preregistered within-subjects studies (N = 686). An initial high-demand task reliably elicited very strong effort phenomenology compared with a low-demand task. Afterward, participants completed a Stroop task. We used drift-diffusion modeling to obtain the boundary (response caution) and drift-rate (information-processing speed) parameters. Bayesian analyses indicated that the high-demand manipulation reduced boundary but not drift rate. Increased effort sensations further predicted reduced boundary. However, our demand manipulation did not affect subsequent inhibition, as assessed with traditional Stroop behavioral measures and additional diffusion-model analyses for conflict tasks. Thus, effort exertion reduced response caution rather than inhibitory control, suggesting that after exerting effort, people disengage and become uninterested in exerting further effort.

Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual.

Physically aggressive individuals’ heightened tendency to decide that ambiguous faces are angry is thought to contribute to their destructive interpersonal behavior. Although this tendency is commonly attributed to bias, other cognitive processes could account for the emotion-identification patterns observed in physical aggression. Diffusion modeling is a valuable tool for parsing the contributions of several cognitive processes known to influence decision-making, including bias, drift rate (efficiency of information accumulation), and threshold separation (extent of information accumulation). In a sample of 90 incarcerated men, we applied diffusion modeling to an emotion-identification task. Physical aggression was positively associated with drift rate (i.e., more efficient information accumulation) for anger, and drift rate mediated the association between physical aggression and heightened anger identification. Physical aggression was not, however, associated with bias or threshold separation. These findings implicate processing efficiency for anger-related information as a potential mechanism driving aberrant emotion identification in physical aggression.

Polygenic scores now explain approximately 10% of the variation in educational attainment. However, they capture not only genetic propensity but also information about the family environment. This is because of passive gene–environment correlation, whereby the correlation between offspring and parent genotypes results in an association between offspring genotypes and the rearing environment. We measured passive gene–environment correlation using information on 6,311 adoptees in the UK Biobank. Adoptees’ genotypes were less correlated with their rearing environments because they did not share genes with their adoptive parents. We found that polygenic scores were twice as predictive of years of education in nonadopted individuals compared with adoptees (R²s = .074 vs. .037, p = 8.23 × 10⁻²⁴). Individuals in the lowest decile of polygenic scores for education attained significantly more education if they were adopted, possibly because of educationally supportive adoptive environments. Overall, these results suggest that genetic influences on education are mediated via the home environment.

Very little is known about how individuals learn under uncertainty when other people are involved. We propose that humans are particularly tuned to social uncertainty, which is especially noisy and ambiguous. Individuals exhibiting less tolerance for uncertainty, such as those with anxiety, may have greater difficulty learning in uncertain social contexts and therefore provide an ideal test population to probe learning dynamics under uncertainty. Using a dynamic trust game and a matched nonsocial task, we found that healthy subjects (n = 257) were particularly good at learning under negative social uncertainty, swiftly figuring out when to stop investing in an exploitative social partner. In contrast, subjects with anxiety (n = 97) overinvested in exploitative partners. Computational modeling attributed this pattern to a selective reduction in learning from negative social events and a failure to enhance learning as uncertainty rises—two mechanisms that likely facilitate adaptive social choice.