EXPRESS: Hands of Confidence: When Gestures Increase Confidence in Spatial Problem Solving

This study aimed to examine whether the metacognitive system monitors the potential positive effects of gestures on spatial thinking. Participants (N = 59, 31F, Mage = 21.67) performed a mental rotation task, consisting of twenty-four problems varying in difficulty, and evaluated their confidence in their answers to problems in either gesture or control conditions. The results revealed that performance and confidence were higher in the gesture condition, in which the participants were asked to use their gestures during problem-solving, compared to the control condition, extending the literature by evidencing gestures` role in metacognition. Yet, the effect was only evident for women, who already performed worse than men, and when the problems were difficult. Encouraging gestures adversely affected performance and confidence in men. Such results suggest that gestures selectively influence cognition and metacognition and highlight the importance of task- (i.e., difficulty) and individual-related variables (i.e., sex) in elucidating the links between gestures, confidence, and spatial thinking

The role of motor simulation in action perception: a neuropsychological case study

Research on embodied cognition stresses that bodily and motor processes constrain how we perceive others. Regarding action perception the most prominent hypothesis is that observed actions are matched to the observer’s own motor representations. Previous findings demonstrate that the motor laws that constrain one’s performance also constrain one’s perception of others’ actions. The present neuropsychological case study asked whether neurological impairments affect a person’s performance and action perception in the same way. The results showed that patient DS, who suffers from a frontal brain lesion, not only ignored target size when performing movements but also when asked to judge whether others can perform the same movements. In other words DS showed the same violation of Fitts’s law when performing and observing actions. These results further support the assumption of close perception action links and the assumption that these links recruit predictive mechanisms residing in the motor system

Mood and social influence: the role of metacognitive ability

Others not only influence our behavior, but also our metacognitive evaluations of those behavior (i.e. decision confidence), even when feedback is random and uninformative. Here we ask if metacognitive ability to monitor reliability of one’s decisions predicts social susceptibility. We also ask if mood (anxiety and depression) further modulates this effect. We gave 46 healthy participants a perceptual task and presented them with random social feedback (positive, negative, neutral). Participants rated their confidence in their decisions before and after feedback, and lastly had an opportunity to change their initial decisions. In a separate task we also measured their metacognitive abilities, as well as their anxiety and depression scores. Results showed metacognitive ability to increase susceptibility to random social feedback. Surprisingly for those with high levels of metacognitive ability anxiety exacerbates this effect, whereas depression suppresses it

Towards Detecting the Zone of Elite Tennis Players Through Wearable Technology

Wearable devices fall short in providing information other than physiological metrics despite athletes' demand for psychological feedback. To address this, we introduce a preliminary exploration to track psychological states of athletes based on commercial wearable devices, coach observations and machine learning. Our system collects Inertial Measuring Unit data from tennis players, while their coaches provide labels on their psychological states. A recurrent neural network is then trained to predict coach labels from sensor data. We test our approach by predicting being in the zone, a psychological state of optimal performance. We conduct two experimental games with two elite coaches and four professional players for evaluation. Our learned models achieve above 85% test accuracy, implying that our approach could be utilized to predict the zone at relatively low cost. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications and feasibility of this approach by contextualizing it in a real-life scenario

Investigating the Influence of Disfluencies and Gestures in Assessing Others' Knowledge: A Feelings of Another’s Knowing (FOAK) Study

People rely on communicative cues when assessing others’ knowledge levels about a topic. Speech fluency has been shown to inform these assessments (Brennan & Williams, 1995), however little is known whether co-speech gestures also impact how we judge others’ level of expertise. To address this, we showed 42 participants (Mage=21.05) short videos of speakers in four conditions (fluent or disfluent speech with gestures, fluent or disfluent speech without gestures). Participants then provided FOAK (feelings of another’s knowing) judgements of the speaker. A mixed effects regression analysis, with conditions as fixed and trial and subjects as random effects, revealed that fluent speech elicited higher FOAK ratings than disfluent speech, p<.01. Surprisingly gestures did not affect FOAK ratings. This is a first study to suggest, fluency can be a more prominent cue than gestures when assessing others’ knowledge levels