News in an era of content confusion: effects of news use motivations and context on native advertising and digital news perceptions

This study examined the effects of differing native advertising framing contexts (hard versus soft news) and individuals’ news use motivations on ability to perceive commercialized content, evaluations of native advertising, and ensuing digital news perceptions. Based upon the framework of the persuasion knowledge model, an online experiment was conducted among a sample of U.S. adults (N = 684). When revealed as advertising, people were more likely to perceive the hard news rather than the soft news framing as commercial in nature. Furthermore, hard news approaches to native advertising were perceived unfavorably by audiences and tarnished the subsequent reporting of actual journalists.Accepted manuscrip

Conferring resistance to digital disinformation: the innoculating influence of procedural news knowledge

Despite the pervasiveness of digital disinformation in society, little is known about the individual characteristics that make some users more susceptible to erroneous information uptake than others, effectively dividing the media audience into prone and resistant groups. This study identifies and tests procedural news knowledge as a consequential civic resource with the capacity to inoculate audiences from disinformation and close this “resistance gap.” Engaging the persuasion knowledge model, the study utilizes data from two national surveys to demonstrate that possessing working knowledge of how the news media operate aids in the identification and effects of fabricated news and native advertising.Accepted manuscrip

Three People Can Synchronize as Coupled Oscillators during Sports Activities

We experimentally investigated the synchronized patterns of three people during sports activities and found that the activity corresponded to spatiotemporal patterns in rings of coupled biological oscillators derived from symmetric Hopf bifurcation theory, which is based on group theory. This theory can provide catalogs of possible generic spatiotemporal patterns irrespective of their internal models. Instead, they are simply based on the geometrical symmetries of the systems. We predicted the synchronization patterns of rings of three coupled oscillators as trajectories on the phase plane. The interactions among three people during a 3 vs. 1 ball possession task were plotted on the phase plane. We then demonstrated that two patterns conformed to two of the three patterns predicted by the theory. One of these patterns was a rotation pattern (R) in which phase differences between adjacent oscillators were almost 2π/3. The other was a partial anti-phase pattern (PA) in which the two oscillators were anti-phase and the third oscillator frequency was dead. These results suggested that symmetric Hopf bifurcation theory could be used to understand synchronization phenomena among three people who communicate via perceptual information, not just physically connected systems such as slime molds, chemical reactions, and animal gaits. In addition, the skill level in human synchronization may play the role of the bifurcation parameter

The COVID-19 vaccine communication handbook. A practical guide for improving vaccine communication and fighting misinformation

This handbook is for journalists, doctors, nurses, policy makers, researchers, teachers, students, parents – in short, it’s for everyone who wants to know more: About the COVID-19 vaccines; How to talk to others about them; How to challenge misinformation about the vaccines.Published versio

Catching a gently thrown ball

Several studies have shown that people can catch a ball even if it is visible only during part of its flight. Here, we examine how well they can do so. We measured the movements of a ball and of the hands of both the thrower and the catcher during one-handed underarm throwing and catching. The catcher's sight was occluded for 250 ms at random moments. Participants could catch most balls without fumbling. They only really had difficulties if vision was occluded before the ball was released and was restored less than 200 ms before the catch. In such cases, it was impossible to accurately predict the ball's trajectory from motion of the ball and of the thrower's hand before the occlusion, and there was not enough time to adjust the catching movement after vision was restored. Even at these limits, people caught most balls quite adequately. © 2010 Springer-Verlag

Joint-action coordination in transferring objects

Here we report a study of joint-action coordination in transferring objects. Fourteen dyads were asked to repeatedly reposition a cylinder in a shared workspace without using dialogue. Variations in task constraints concerned the size of the two target regions in which the cylinder had to be (re)positioned and the size and weight of the transferred cylinder. Movements of the wrist, index finger and thumb of both actors were recorded by means of a 3D motion-tracking system. Data analyses focused on the interpersonal transfer of lifting-height and movement-speed variations. Whereas the analyses of variance did not reveal any interpersonal transfer effects targeted data comparisons demonstrated that the actor who fetched the cylinder from where the other actor had put it was systematically less surprised by cylinder-weight changes than the actor who was first confronted with such changes. In addition, a moderate, accuracy-constraint independent adaptation to each other’s movement speed was found. The current findings suggest that motor resonance plays only a moderate role in collaborative motor control and confirm the independency between sensorimotor and cognitive processing of action-related information