Compared to previous studies of competition with participants' direct involvement, the current study for the first time investigated the influence of competitive outcomes on attentional bias from a perspective of an onlooker. Two simple games were employed: the Rock-Paper-Scissors game (Experiment 1) in which the outcome is based on luck, and Arm-wrestling (Experiment 2), in which the outcome i...

Bias occurs in perceptual decisions when the reward associated with a particular response dominates the sensory evidence in support of a choice. However, it remains unclear how this bias is acquired and once acquired, how it influences perceptual decision processes in the brain. We addressed these questions using model-based neuroimaging in a motion discrimination paradigm where contextual cues...

Does bright lighting seem more desirable when people feel hopeless? Common parlance such as ‘‘ray of hope’’ depicts an association between hope and the perception of brightness. Building on research in embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor, we examined whether incidental emotion of hopelessness can affect brightness perception, which may influence people’s preference for lighting. Across f...

Reactions to the use of the ACT/SAT, biodata, and situational judgment measures in college admissions decisions were collected from 644 college freshmen. Evaluation of a series of models of fairness perceptions indicated that self-serving bias and organizational justice explanations may both be responsible for these reactions. Examination of respondents’ beliefs about their performance compared...

Studies of patients with focal brain lesions and neuroimaging indicate that face processing is predominantly based on right hemisphere function. Additionally, experiments using chimeric faces, where the left and the right-hand side of the face are different, have shown that observers tend to bias their responses toward the information on the left. Here, we monitored eye-movements during a gende...

A conceptual fan effect is the finding that as participants study more items related to a concept, retrieval latency and errors for any particular item increases. Previous behavioral research in our laboratory suggests that the perceptual features of the stimulus influence memory in a manner that is analogous to the influence of conceptual features; that is, we have demonstrated a perceptual fa...

Several affective and cognitive processes have been found to be pivotal in affecting aesthetic experience of artworks and both neuropsychological as well as psychiatric symptoms have been found to affect artistic production. However, there is a paucity of studies directly investigating effects of brain lesions on aesthetic judgment. Here, we assessed the effects of unilateral brain damage on ae...

Overconfident subjects were given immediate feedback of results in a general knowledge test in an attempt to de-bias them. In a 2 x 3 x 4 mixed factorial design (Feedback x Question Difficulty x Trial Blocks), the accuracy, confidence, and overconfidence of judgements of 150 subjects (48 male and 102 female) were measured. Hard questions produced significantly higher levels of overconfidence th...