Mortality salience refers to being reminded of death, which increases self-reported prosociality in student samples. Here, we examined effects mortality on actual donations, a national life-span sample (N = 5,376). In the mortality-salience (vs. control) condition, participants donated average 25 cents more charity, out their $5 budget. This finding was unaffected by adult age or charity type, ...

In what ways are weather and climate (and changes in weather and climate) psychologically significant to people? How is the importance that people attach to weather and climate manifested on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral levels? These questions are addressed in the present project which describes the further development and evaluation of a psychological measurement tool, the Weather Sali...

Incentive salience is a motivational property with 'magnet-like' qualities. When attributed to reward-predicting stimuli (cues), incentive salience triggers a pulse of 'wanting' and an individual is pulled toward the cues and reward. A key computational question is how incentive salience is generated during a cue re-encounter, which combines both learning and the state of limbic brain mechanism...

We investigate how the salience of an ethnic minority affects majority group’s voting behavior. use increased Muslim communities during Ramadan as a natural experiment. Exploiting exogenous variation in distance election dates to over 1980–2013 period Germany, our findings reveal polarization. Vote shares for both right- and left-wing extremist parties increase municipalities with mosques when ...

One of the key problems in the field of telemedicine is the prediction of the patient’s health state change based on incoming non-invasively measured vital data. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are a powerful statistical modeling tool suitable for this problem. Feature salience algorithms for ANN provide information about feature importance and help selecting relevant input variables. Looking ...

We present a cortical-based model for computing the perceptual salience of contours embedded in noisy images. It has been suggested (Gilbert, 1992; Field, Hayes & Hess, 1993) that horizontal intra-cortical connections in primary visual cortex may modulate contrast detection thresholds and pre-attentive “popout”. In our model, horizontal connections mediate context-dependent facilitatory and inh...