Strong Effort Manipulations Reduce Response Caution:A Preregistered Reinvention of the Ego-Depletion Paradigm

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. </p

Yourfeed: Towards open science and interoperable systems for social media

Existing social media platforms (SMPs) make it incredibly difficult for researchers to conduct studies on social media, which in turn has created a knowledge gap between academia and industry about the effects of platform design on user behavior. To close the gap, we introduce Yourfeed, a research tool for conducting ecologically valid social media research. We introduce the platform architecture, as well key opportunities such as assessing the effects of exposure of content on downstream beliefs and attitudes, measuring attentional exposure via dwell time, and evaluating heterogeneous newsfeed algorithms. We discuss the underlying philosophy of interoperability for social media and future developments for the platform

Quantifying attention via dwell time and engagement in a social media browsing environment

Modern computational systems have an unprecedented ability to detect, leverage and influence human attention. Prior work identified user engagement and dwell time as two key metrics of attention in digital environments, but these metrics have yet to be integrated into a unified model that can advance the theory andpractice of digital attention. We draw on work from cognitive science, digital advertising, and AI to propose a two-stage model of attention for social media environments that disentangles engagement and dwell. In an online experiment, we show that attention operates differently in these two stages and find clear evidence of dissociation: when dwelling on posts (Stage 1), users attend more to sensational than credible content, but when deciding whether to engage with content (Stage 2), users attend more to credible than sensational content. These findings have implications for the design and development of computational systems that measure and model human attention, such as newsfeed algorithms on social media.Comment: All Things Attention NeurIPS Worksho

How many others have shared this? Experimentally investigating the effects of social cues on engagement, misinformation, and unpredictability on social media

Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we investigate the causal effect of social cues on users' engagement with social media posts. We conducted an experiment with N=628 Americans on a custom-built newsfeed interface where we systematically varied the presence and strength of social cues. We find that when cues are shown, indicating that a larger number of others have engaged with a post, users were more likely to share and like that post. Furthermore, relative to a control without social cues, the presence of social cues increased the sharing of true relative to false news. The presence of social cues also makes it more difficult to precisely predict how popular any given post would be. Together, our results suggest that -- instead of distracting users or causing them to share low-quality news -- social cues may, in certain circumstances, actually boost truth discernment and reduce the sharing of misinformation. Our work suggests that social cues play important roles in shaping users' attention and engagement on social media, and platforms should understand the effects of different cues before making changes to what cues are displayed and how

Expectations of reward and efficacy guide cognitive control allocation

The amount of mental effort we invest in a task is influenced by the reward we can expect if we perform that task well. However, some of the rewards that have the greatest potential for driving these efforts are partly determined by factors beyond ones control. In such cases, effort has more limited efficacy for obtaining rewards. According to the Expected Value of Control theory, people integrate information about the expected reward and efficacy of task performance to determine the expected value of control, and then adjust their control allocation (i.e., mental effort) accordingly. Here we test this theorys key behavioral and neural predictions. We show that participants invest more cognitive control when this control is more rewarding and more efficacious, and that these incentive components separately modulate EEG signatures of incentive evaluation and proactive control allocation. Our findings support the prediction that people combine expectations of reward and efficacy to determine how much effort to invest

Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone

Misinformation remains a serious problem and continues to be a major focus of intervention efforts. Psychological inoculation - a popular intervention approach wherein people are taught to identify manipulation techniques - is being adopted at scale around the globe by technology companies in an effort to combat misinformation. Yet the efficacy of this approach for increasing belief accuracy remains unclear, as prior work has largely focused on technique identification - rather than accuracy judgments - using synthetic materials that do not contain claims of truth or falsity. To address this issue, we conducted 5 studies with 7,286 online participants using a set of news headlines based on real-world false and true content in which we systematically varied the presence or absence of emotional manipulation. Although an emotional manipulation inoculation video did help participants identify emotional manipulation (replicating past work), there was no carry-over effect to improving participants’ ability to tell truth from falsehood (i.e. no effect on truth discernment). Encouragingly, however, when the emotional inoculation was paired with an accuracy prompt - i.e., an intervention intended to draw people’s attention to the concept of accuracy when they are receiving the inoculation intervention - the combined intervention did successfully improve truth discernment by increasing belief in true content. These results generate new insights regarding inoculation, and provide evidence for a key synergy between two popular psychological interventions against misinformation

Midfrontal theta and pupil dilation parametrically track subjective conflict (but also surprise) during intertemporal choice

Many everyday choices are based on personal, subjective preferences. When choosing between two options, we often feel conflicted, especially when trading off costs and benefits occurring at different times (e.g., saving for later versus spending now). Although previous work has investigated the neurophysiological basis of conflict during inhibitory control tasks, less is known about subjective conflict resulting from competing subjective preferences. In this pre-registered study, we investigated subjective conflict during intertemporal choice, whereby participants chose between smaller immediate versus larger delayed rewards (e.g., $15 today vs.$22 in 30 days). We used economic modeling to parametrically vary eleven different levels of conflict, and recorded EEG data and pupil dilation. Midfrontal theta power, derived from EEG, correlated with pupil responses, and our results suggest that these signals track different gradations of subjective conflict. Unexpectedly, both signals were also maximally enhanced when decisions were surprisingly easy. Therefore, these signals may track events requiring increased attention and adaptive shifts in behavioral responses, with subjective conflict being only one type of such event. Our results suggest that the neural systems underlying midfrontal theta and pupil responses interact when weighing costs and benefits during intertemporal choice. Thus, understanding these interactions might elucidate how individuals resolve self-control conflicts

The lipoxygenase-dependent oxygenation of lipid body membranes is promoted by a patatin-type phospholipase in cucumber cotyledons

Oilseed germination is characterized by the mobilization of storage lipids as a carbon and energy source for embryonic growth. In addition to storage lipid degradation in germinating oilseeds via the direct action of a triacylglycerol lipase (TGL) on the storage lipids, a second degradation pathway that is dependent on a specific lipid body trilinoleate 13-lipoxygenase (13-LOX) has been proposed in several plant species. The activity of this specific 13-LOX leads first to the formation of ester lipid hydroperoxides. These hydroperoxy fatty acids are then preferentially cleaved off by a TGL and serve as a substrate for glyoxysomal β-oxidation. As a prerequisite for triacylglycerol (TAG) mobilization, a partial degradation of the phospholipid monolayer and/or membrane proteins of the oil body has been discussed. Evidence has now been found for both processes: partial degradation of the proteins caleosin and oleosin was observed and simultaneously a patatin-like protein together with transient phospholipase (PLase) activity could be detected at the oil body membranes during germination. Moreover, in vitro experiments with isolated oil bodies from mature seeds revealed that the formation of 13-LOX-derived lipid peroxides in lipid body membranes is increased after incubation with the purified recombinant patatin-like protein. These experiments suggest that in vivo the degradation of storage lipids in cucumber cotyledons is promoted by the activity of a specific oil body PLase, which leads to an increased decomposition of the oil body membrane by the 13-LOX and thereby TAGs may be better accessible to LOX and TGL