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Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders A Challenging Visual Task Simple, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz
Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders A Challenging Visual Task Simple, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz
Psychology Faculty Articles and Research
Suggestions can cause some individuals to miss or disregard existing visual stimuli, but can they infuse sensory input with nonexistent information? Although several prominent theories of hypnotic suggestion propose that mental imagery can change our perceptual experience, data to support this stance remain sparse. The present study addressed this lacuna, showing how suggesting the presence of physically absent, yet critical, visual information transforms an otherwise difficult task into an easy one. Here, we show how adult participants who are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion successfully hallucinated visual occluders on top of moving objects. Our findings support the idea that, at …
Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse
Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our …
S3e6: How Do Face Masks Affect First Impressions?, Ron Lisnet, Mollie Ruben
S3e6: How Do Face Masks Affect First Impressions?, Ron Lisnet, Mollie Ruben
The Maine Question
There’s an adage that people don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Mollie Ruben, assistant professor of psychology, examines how face masks affect people’s first impressions of others during the COVID-19 outbreak. Do people appear more or less smart to others, depending on whether they’re wearing or not wearing a mask? More or less friendly? Learn about this research project conducted by Ruben, who directs the Emotion, Pain, and Interpersonal Communication (EPIC) Lab at the University of Maine.
Peer Influence On Conformity And Confidence In A Perceptual Judgment Task, Alen Hajnal, Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill
Peer Influence On Conformity And Confidence In A Perceptual Judgment Task, Alen Hajnal, Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill
Faculty Publications
© 2020 by authors. Undergraduate college students were presented with two arrays of dots varying in numerosity on a computer screen and asked to indicate if the arrays differed in number. They also rated their level of confidence in their responses. Trials varied in difficulty based on the size of the arrays. On half of the trials, participants were shown the ostensible responses of confederates to test the effect of peer influence on numerosity judgments and participant confidence. On the other half of the trials, participants received no information about the responses of the confederates to provide a measure of …