Registered replication report: a large multilab cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri, Buckwalter, & Blouw (2015)

According to the Justified True Belief account of knowledge (JTB), a person can only truly know something if they have a belief that is both justified and true (i.e., knowledge is justified true belief). This account was challenged by Gettier (1963), who argued that JTB does not explain knowledge attributions in certain situations, later called Gettier-type cases, wherein a protagonist is justified in believing something to be true, but their belief was only correct due to luck. Lay people may not attribute knowledge to protagonists with justified but only luckily true beliefs. While some research has found evidence for these so-called Gettier intuitions (e.g., Machery et al., 2017a), Turri et al. (2015) found no evidence that participants attributed knowledge in a counterfeit-object Gettier-type case differently than in a matched case of justified true belief. In a large-scale, cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri and colleagues’ (2015) Experiment 1 (N = 4,724) using a within-participants design and three vignettes across 19 geopolitical regions, we did find evidence for Gettier intuitions; participants were 1.86 times more likely to attribute knowledge to protagonists in standard cases of justified true belief than to protagonists in Gettier-type cases. These results suggest that Gettier intuitions may be detectable across different scenarios and cultural contexts. However, the size of the Gettier intuition effect did vary by vignette, and the Turri et al. (2015) vignette produced the smallest effect, which was similar in size to that observed in the original study. Differences across vignettes suggest epistemic intuitions may also depend on contextual factors unrelated to the criteria of knowledge, such as the characteristics of the protagonist being evaluated

Introduction to Open Science Workshop

Introduction to Open Science Workshop presented at the CARLA PhD day at the University of Lausanne (22/09/2022)

The Interplay Between Working Memory and Attention: Characterizing the Internal Focus of Attention

Working memory is a limited-capacity maintenance mechanism that is responsible for processing and keeping information available over a short period of time. Attention, on the other hand, can be defined as a mechanism for the selection and prioritization of elements among many. When attention is focused on a specific piece of information within working memory, this information is assumed to be in the focus of attention. Over the years, the focus of attention has been a much-discussed topic in the field of working memory. Still, there are some characteristics of the focus of attention that remain a topic of debate. Therefore, the current thesis addressed three issues in the literature: (1) whether the accessibility of a representation in the focus of attention is heightened or reduced compared to other representations in working memory, (2) whether a representation in the focus of attention is protected from or (particularly) vulnerable to perceptual interference compared to other representations in working memory, and (3) whether the relation between focusing attention internally (i.e., within working memory) and externally (i.e., toward the environment) is truly asymmetrical. Concerning the first issue, our findings were in line with the literature such that the accessibility of a representation in the focus of attention appears to be heightened by default. However, there can be specific task situations in which this heightened accessibility will be masked or can even turn into reduced accessibility. Concerning the second issue, our findings demonstrated that memory representations are generally not that susceptible to perceptual interference, regardless of whether the representation resides in the focus of attention or not. Concerning the third issue, our findings demonstrated that there is indeed an asymmetrical relation between internal and external attention, which cannot be explained by an imbalance in representational strength of the internal and external information. The theoretical implications of the current thesis contribute to our understanding of the interplay between working memory and attention

SwissRN Preregistration Workshop

SwissRN Preregistration Worksho

Distractor susceptibility in visual working memory: No evidence for particularly vulnerable mnemonic representations in the focus of attention

Selectively focusing attention allows us to prioritize specific information within working memory. The current study investigates the consequences of focused attention for prioritized information in visual working memory. Specifically, in three behavioral experiments, we study how focused attention modulates the distractor susceptibility of mental representations that are the object of focused attention, using different prioritization modes (spontaneous, cued-based, and reward-based prioritization). When we relied on spontaneous prioritization in Experiments 1a and 1b, our findings indicated that information in the focus of attention is as vulnerable to perceptual interference as information represented elsewhere in working memory, and this did not change over time. When prioritization was externally-guided in Experiment 2, we found information in the focus of attention to be either protected from perceptual interference (when using cue-based prioritization) or as vulnerable as information represented elsewhere in working memory (when using reward-based prioritization), regardless of when the priority signal was presented (before, during, or after encoding). Thus, overall, distractor susceptibility of information in working memory was revealed to be either reduced (when cue-based) or unaffected (when spontaneous or reward-based) by prioritization, but never increased in the current study. Theoretical implications for the focus of attention are discussed

Prioritization in Visual Working Memory: An Investigation of Distractor Susceptibility and Different Prioritization Modes

Previous studies have shown that information in the focus of attention in working memory is better remembered, accessed faster, and protected better from perceptual interference than information in working memory, outside of the focus of attention. However, the latter has been called into question by several studies that observed particular vulnerability to perceptual interference for information in the focus of attention. To advance this debate, the current study investigated whether focusing attention on prioritized information makes it more or less susceptible to distractors. For this purpose, we made use of two prioritization modes: retro-cueing and rewarding. Throughout ten behavioral experiments in which we used two different paradigms and varied several task parameters, we did not observe any convincing evidence for a detrimental impact of perceptual interference on memory performance, regardless of whether and how the to-be-remembered information had been prioritized. This suggests that visual working memory might be more resilient to perceptual interference than previously assumed. These findings, together with those of other recent studies, indicate that the key question should be when memory representations are vulnerable to interference, before we can investigate how this vulnerability interacts with the focus of attention. Moreover, a detailed comparison of different variants of cue-based and reward-based prioritization methods within our paradigm revealed that cue-based prioritization is more effective than reward-based prioritization in working memory and that what is gained in terms of memory performance for the prioritized item is not always as substantial as what is lost for the unprioritized items

Putting the “return” back in the inhibition of return effect in working memory

The inhibition of return effect in perception refers to the observation that one is slower to re-attend a location that was attended right before, compared to a location that was not attended right before. Johnson et al. (2013, Psych. Sc., 24, 1104–1112, doi:10.1177/0956797612466414) observed a similar inhibitory effect for an attended item in working memory, which the authors referred to as an inhibition-of-return-like effect. However, testing an inhibition of return effect requires attention to be disengaged from the attended item, before testing whether participants are slower to return to said item. This was not the case in the paradigm by Johnson and colleagues. In the current study, we re-investigated whether an inhibition of return effect can be observed in working memory by experimentally disengaging attention from the attended item before measuring whether responses are slower for the item in question. Participants were indeed slower to respond to a memory probe that matched the item that was attended right before, compared to a memory probe that matched the item that was not attended right before. Thus, our stricter test did result in an inhibition of return effect in working memory