We are continuously exposed to what others think and feel about content online. How do others’ evaluations shared in this medium influence our own beliefs and emotional responses? In two pre-registered studies, we investigated the social transmission of threat and safety evaluations in a paradigm that mimicked online social media platforms. In Study 1 (N = 103), participants viewed images and indicated how distressed they made them feel. Participants then categorised these images as threatening or safe for others to see, (...) while seeing how “previous participants” ostensibly categorised them (these values were actually manipulated across images). We found that participants incorporated both peers’ categorisations of the images and their own distress ratings when categorizing images as threatening or safe. Study 2 (N = 115) replicated these findings and further demonstrated that peers’ categorisations shifted how distressed these images made them feel. Taken together, our results indicate that people integrate their own and others’ experiences when exposed to emotional content and that social information can influence both our perceptions of things as threatening or safe, as well as our own emotional responses to them. Our findings provide replicable experimental evidence that social information is a powerful conduit for the transmission of affective evaluations and experiences. (shrink)

Attention can be oriented in space covertly without the need of eye movements. We used multivariate pattern classification analyses (MVPA) to investigate whether the time course of the deployment of covert spatial attention leading up to the observer’s perceptual decision can be decoded from both EEG alpha power and raw activity traces. Decoding attention from these signals can help determine whether raw EEG signals and alpha power reflect the same or distinct features of attentional selection. Using a classical cueing task, (...) we showed that the orientation of covert spatial attention can be decoded by both signals. However, raw activity and alpha power may reflect different features of spatial attention, with alpha power more associated with the orientation of covert attention in space and raw activity with the influence of attention on perceptual processes. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the limitations of the E-Z Reader model in its attempt to explain refixation saccades in reading. Listing factors that influence probability of refixating leads the model to assume two sorts of refixations. However, taking into account data on the metrics of refixation saccades allows us to propose an alternative explanation for empirical observations reported in the literature.

We provide a translation of Binet and Henri’s pioneering 1894 paper on the influence of suggestibility on memory. Alfred Binet is famous as the author who created the IQ test that bears his name, but he is almost unknown as the psychological investigator who generated numerous original experiments and fascinating results in the study of memory. His experiments published in 1894 manipulated suggestibility in several ways to determine effects on remembering. Three particular modes of suggestion were employed to induce false (...) recognitions: indirect suggestion by a preconceived idea; direct suggestion; and collective suggestion. In the commentary we suggest that Binet and Henri’s paper written over 115 years ago is still highly relevant even today. In particular, Binet’s legacy lives on in modern research on misinformation effects in memory, in studies of conformity, and in experiments on the social contagion of memory. (shrink)