In the present study, we examined oculomotor dynamics during the completion of three measures of attention control among a large sample of young adults (N = 388). First, we address the ongoing question regarding the coherence of attention control as a cognitive construct. Here, we find that attention control can be measured reliably and is correlated with yet distinct from working memory capacity. Then, we examined fixation stability prior to cue and stimulus onsets in the antisaccade, psychomotor vigilance, and sustained attention to cue tasks. We hypothesized that gaze stability-or quiet eye-would be associated with superior attention control both within and between individuals. In the antisaccade and sustained attention to cue tasks, accurate responses were preceded by a more stable gaze position; in the psychomotor vigilance task, quiet eye was associated with faster responses. Further, in all three tasks, attention performance was correlated with gaze stability across individuals. Finally, individual differences in quiet eye were distinct from individual differences in working memory capacity and self-reported motivation, each of which also accounted for significant variance in attention control. The findings affirm the presence of attention control as a cognitive construct and provide new insight into the mechanisms that underlie intra- and interindividual variability in attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory (WM) has been proposed to act as a gateway into long-term memory (LTM), such that only information successfully stored in WM can be transferred into LTM. Accordingly, the capacity limit of WM should constrain the acquisition of LTM traces. Evidence for that prediction is mixed: Some studies showed that increasing WM load translated into weaker LTM of the memorized information. Others found no effect of WM load on LTM learning. Here we present the results of three experiments that comprehensively test the gateway hypothesis. All experiments included a WM test and a delayed LTM test for the same information. WM set size was varied from two to eight or 10 items. Further, we varied the type of materials (verbal or visual), whether the task requires memory for items or bindings, and the type of test (recognition vs. recall). The WM set size influenced performance in the LTM test only when two conditions were met: (a) The WM task involved tests of item memory through old-new recognition with concrete objects or words, and (b) LTM was tested for items not tested in the WM test. Yet even these effects were not found consistently across all experiments. This registered report indicates that increasing WM load rarely impairs LTM encoding, implying that WM capacity does not act as a bottleneck to the formation of memory traces in LTM under most conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Blindfolding-selecting candidates based on objective selection tests while avoiding personal information about their race and gender-is commonly used to mitigate bias in selection. Selection tests, however, often benefit people of a certain race or gender. In such cases, selecting the best candidates requires incorporating, rather than ignoring, the biasing factor. We examined people's preference for avoiding candidates' race and gender, even when fully aware that these factors bias the selection test. We put forward a novel prediction suggesting that paradoxically, due to their fear of appearing partial, people would choose not to reveal race and gender information, even when doing so means making suboptimal decisions. Across three experiments (N = 3,621), hiring professionals (and laypeople) were tasked with selecting the best candidate for a position when they could reveal the candidate's race and gender or avoid it. We further measured how fear for their social image corresponds with their decision, as well as how job applicants perceive such actions. The results supported our predictions, showing that more than 50% did not reveal gender and race information. By contrast, only 30% did not reveal situational biasing information-features of the situation rather than the individual-such as the time of day in which the selection test occurred. Those who did not reveal information expressed higher concerns for their social and self-image than those who decided to reveal. We conclude that decision-makers avoid personal biasing information to maintain a positive image, yet by doing so, they compromise fairness and accuracy alike. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In recent years, there has been an exponential growth of research investigating the psychological consequences of economic inequality. More and more experimental manipulations of economic inequality have been used, allowing researchers to infer the causal effects of inequality on a wide range of psychosocial variables. We conducted a systematic review of research that has manipulated perceived economic inequality, followed by a meta-analysis examining (a) the effectiveness of different perceived economic inequality manipulations and (b) their impact on the different outcomes studied (e.g., descriptive norms). In total, 60 studies were included in the meta-analysis, with an average of 141 participants per group (total of 31,637 participants). The meta-analytic results showed that experimental manipulations affected inequality perceptions, yet there is large variability in their effectiveness. Although the type of paradigm used and characteristics of the manipulations accounted for some of this heterogeneity, much remains unexplained. Moreover, experimental manipulations of perceived economic inequality mostly influenced and followed, in order, by and We discuss the implications of our findings and offer advice for researchers using paradigms to manipulate economic inequality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Listeners must cope with highly variable input to successfully recognize speech. One way they do this is by adapting to the systematicities of individual talkers. Research on talker-specific adaptation has found that listeners either generalize talker-specific phoneme categories to new talkers or individuate them, creating talker-specific categories. Five experiments investigated the conditions under which listeners generalize or individuate talker-specific phoneme categories using a distributional learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 413) acquired a novel voicing boundary for a new talker and generalized this boundary to another novel talker. In a later session (1-3 days later), they were trained on a second novel talker but showed no evidence of learning it and no evidence of retaining the first talker. Experiment 2 (N = 355) demonstrated that the lack of retention was not a product of interference from learning in the second session. We also asked if listeners individuate talkers when exposed to multiple talkers simultaneously in a distributional learning paradigm (Experiment 3, N = 113) and in a supervised learning paradigm (Experiment 4, N = 125). Neither showed evidence for talker-specific learning. Finally, Experiment 5 (N = 97) demonstrated rapid learning of new categories in as few as 48 trials, which can rapidly be unlearned at test or in a new training block. This argues participants rapidly adapt a set of categories to the current listening environment, but imperfectly, adapting a single boundary to each new talker rather than demonstrating talker-specifically. This good-enough adaptation may be sufficient for everyday needs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Girls and women are disproportionately underrepresented at the top of performance distributions, including in both male- and female-stereotyped fields. Although early-developing gender disparities at the top have been well-documented, little is known about how they develop and the sociopsychological processes that give rise to their emergence. Here, we tested the possibility that social contexts that use publicity as a form of motivation for top performance (e.g., public praise, titles, awards) may contribute to such disparities. Three preregistered experimental studies with elementary-age children, adolescents, and adults (N = 1,518) revealed that by at least middle childhood, (a) boys and men are more willing to publicize their own top than average performance, while girls and women are equally willing to publicize top and average performance, and (b) public acknowledgment of top performance boosts men's willingness to achieve top performance, but not women's (and demotivates girls but not boys). Together, these data reveal that a common form of motivation used in the classroom and beyond is systematically more effective for boys and men than girls and women, thus illustrating how sociopsychological processes and modifiable social contexts underlie patterns of female underrepresentation at the top. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Utilitarian ethical theories argue that the morality of actions depends on their consequences for impartially maximizing overall welfare. Recent research suggests that individual differences in utilitarian tendencies fall along two dimensions: a permissive attitude toward harming others for greater good (instrumental harm [IH]) and an impartial concern for others' welfare (impartial beneficence [IB]). We hypothesize that these dimensions operate as intuitive theories in the moral domain, framing distinctive patterns of moral judgments and behavior. Using intersubject representational similarity analysis of behavioral data (N = 254), we found that when participants shared endorsement of instrumental harm or impartial beneficence, they showed similar patterns of moral judgment and decision making. Intersubject representational similarity analysis of functional neuroimaging data (N = 68) revealed that participants with similar endorsement of instrumental harm or impartial beneficence showed similar neural encoding of moral choice attributes, even when they made different choices. Meanwhile, participants with dissimilar endorsement of these dimensions showed distinctive neural encoding of moral choice attributes, even when they made similar choices. These similarity and dissimilarity patterns emerged in distinct brain regions for instrumental harm and impartial beneficence. Together, our findings suggest that instrumental harm and impartial beneficence distinctively frame cognitive representations of moral decision problems, over and above guiding judgments and decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Voluntary imagery is described as "weak perception" and is thought to be represented through activating the neurons corresponding to imagined features, that is, activation hypothesis. However, direct evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. Inspired by Pace et al. (2023), we examine an alternative suppression hypothesis, which states imagery involves suppression of neurons favoring nearby nonimagined features. While the activation hypothesis predicts a bell-shaped tuning curve of the neural representation for the imagined feature, the suppression hypothesis predicts a W-shaped tuning curve. To test these two hypotheses, we combined an imagery task with a discrimination task following the logic that different imagery-induced tuning curves would differently bias the perceived difference in the discrimination task. We probed the bias pattern by systematically manipulating the physical orientation difference and the discrimination-imagery relation condition. A series of psychophysical experiments were conducted. Results showed that after an imagery prior, bias pattern in the discrimination task followed the prediction of suppression hypothesis (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when substituting the imagery prior with a strong/weak perceptual prior, bias pattern was consistent with the prediction of activation hypothesis (Experiments 2a and 2b). Confounding effects of visual attention and perceptual imagery cue were excluded (Experiments 1b and 1c). We further constructed mathematical models and again validated our findings. In conclusion, behavioral and modeling results coherently suggested that the suppression hypothesis was a better explanation for imagery than the activation hypothesis. Our study challenges the traditional activation theory and provides novel empirical evidence for the suppressive representation of voluntary visual imagery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

How are body movements represented? While research suggests that movements are selected and initiated by anticipating their perceptual effects, the representational content of these anticipated effects remains underspecified. Specifically, it is unknown whether effect anticipations represent desired perceptual end states or intended perceptual changes leading to these end states. Here, we introduced a novel method to distinguish between the two representational contents and applied it in three preregistered experiments. Our results consistently favored transitional codes, indicating that the mind represents and controls body movements through the perceptual changes that they reliably produce. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In Jerusalem's complex ethnic landscape, where Arab and Jewish communities coexist with varying degrees of integration, this research examines how intergroup contact shapes young children's cooperative behavior with in-group versus out-group peers. Across three studies, we investigated how different levels of interethnic proximity influence the distributive decisions of 5-year-old Arab and Jewish children ( = 5.1; 50% boys; = 320) in one-shot, costly reciprocal interactions with unfamiliar, age- and gender-matched peers presented via video. In Study 1, children from distant, ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods ("low-contact" setting) reciprocated fairness at chance levels (Arab children) or below (Jewish children), regardless of the partner's ethnicity. In Study 2, involving children from adjacent but still homogeneous neighborhoods with greater ethnic visibility ("medium-contact" setting), children displayed a clear group bias-reciprocating fairness toward in-group partners but not out-group ones. In Study 3, conducted in a bilingual, ethnically integrated school characterized by daily, structured intergroup contact ("high-contact" setting), group-biased behavior disappeared, and fairness was reciprocated across group lines. These three distinct behavioral patterns-emerging within a single city, using a unified paradigm-highlight how young children's cooperative behavior reflects the everyday social environments they inhabit. The findings underscore that social practices, such as fairness, could be adaptive responses shaped by the structure of intergroup experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Are current members of a social group responsible for making amends for the harm caused by their predecessors? We explored U.S. children's and adults' views on whether responsibility is limited to the original perpetrators or extends to the group's present members. Across four studies (342 children [6-12 years; 50% girls, 49% boys, 1% gender unknown; 52% White, 21% Asian, 7% Hispanic, 5% Black, 9% other, 6% race unknown] and 665 adults [47% women, 52% men, 1% gender unknown; 74% White, 10% Black, 6% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 4% other, 1% race unknown]), participants evaluated vignettes where an advantaged group could compensate a disadvantaged group that they had previously harmed or that was disadvantaged for independent reasons. Younger children believed wealthy groups should always compensate poorer ones, while older children and adults judged compensation more necessary when harm was caused by the advantaged group (Experiment 1). Older children also believed compensation and apology should be offered even when the disadvantaged group had recovered economically (Experiment 2) or when the current members of the advantageous group no longer benefit from the harm (Experiment 3). Adults, while ambivalent about monetary compensation in these cases, agreed on the need for apology. Experiment 4 replicated Experiment 2 with more realistic stimuli, confirming that adults' overall high collective responsibility ascriptions were not caused by the child-friendly materials used in Experiments 1-3. Although limited by a U.S. convenience sample, these findings suggest that children, like adults, attribute collective responsibility for harms committed by a group's predecessors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Record numbers of women students have enrolled in graduate business programs-a path to greater career prospects. Yet gender disparities in grades and career outcomes persist. Research suggests that one reason why they persist is because business schools are-and have been historically-male-dominated with cultures characterized by masculine defaults. These cultures regard stereotypically masculine characteristics and behaviors (e.g., being assertive and competitive) as neutral, necessary, or standard. In business school settings, we investigate whether there are gender disparities in a critical aspect of students' experiences: classroom participation. In an observational field study of 3,159 students across 76 Master of Business Administration classrooms, we find a gender gap in actual student participation behavior. Importantly, however, our findings indicate that this gap is not inevitable. Using thin-slice impressions of professors' behaviors during classroom interactions, we find that when professors diverge from the masculine default by exhibiting "feminine" behavioral cues (e.g., subtle other-oriented behaviors), the gender participation gap closes. In a second, preregistered experiment, we provide causal evidence that professors' behavioral cues affect student participants' anticipated participation by shaping their experiences of inclusion. Our findings highlight that, in male-dominated settings, shifting professors' behavioral cues away from masculine defaults has the potential to create more equitable spaces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Zero-sum beliefs, the idea that for one person to gain another must lose, are pervasive even in situations that are not zero-sum. This undermines judgment across contexts such as interpersonal relations, labor relations, public policies, international relations, and economic transactions. Here, we investigate how zero-sum beliefs differ as people age and why it happens. Across four experimental studies ( = 2,473), we discovered that older people hold fewer zero-sum beliefs than younger individuals. We show that this is partly a result of adopting more positive thinking than younger people and perceiving resources as less scarce. Using World Values Survey data ( = 207,171), we then find that this reduction in zero-sum beliefs is a function of both age and generation: The older people get, the less they hold zero-sum beliefs, the generation who is older today is less zero-sum than today's young generation. When people perceive situations that are not zero-sum as if they were zero-sum, it undermines the potential to increase mutual gains. The reduction of this bias with age could provide older people with opportunities they missed out on when they were younger. These findings are important in understanding the process of aging, and they have implications for negotiations and policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Gender essentialist and stereotypical beliefs emerge early in childhood, even though parents rarely discuss essentialist ideas with young children and often try to communicate egalitarian messages. Here we considered that parents' generic references to gender, which subtly convey that gender reflects a natural kind, could contribute to the transmission of these beliefs even when they express counter-stereotypic ideas. In this preregistered study, we used unmoderated remote research methods to record 192 parent-child dyads (children ages 3-5) talking about gender and assess children's gender essentialism and stereotypes. Parents' generic references to gender predicted children's essentialism and stereotyping, even when this language expressed neutral and counter-stereotypic content. These findings suggest that highlighting specific counter-stereotypical examples (e.g., "That girl is great at soccer!") might be more effective than counter-stereotypical generic sentences (e.g., "Girls are good at soccer too!") at mitigating gender essentialism and stereotyping in childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People must sometimes choose between seeking accurate beliefs and upholding partisan beliefs. How do people evaluate individuals who diverge from an inaccurate ingroup consensus in their pursuit of truth? To answer this question, we conducted two preregistered studies with adults and 6- to 9-year-old children from the United States ( = 632). Participants evaluated information-seeking, belief change, belief stasis, and outgroup belief endorsement in scenarios involving conflicting intergroup ideologies, in which adopting a new belief entailed a departure from an ingrained belief held by fellow group members. Both adults and children praised others for pursuing the truth through information-seeking and belief revision and for telling others that an evidence-based outgroup belief is correct. However, these positive evaluations were less pronounced for real-world, politically divisive issues in which participants' own political group's beliefs were at stake (Study 1), as compared to hypothetical situations involving fictional groups and novel beliefs (Study 2). Overall, these results indicate that people think it is generally desirable for others to pursue accuracy even at the cost of group loyalty, and this is true by the age of 6. Thus, the formation and retention of unsupported partisan beliefs may frequently be misaligned with the epistemic values that people reflectively endorse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Some memories are vivid and detailed, while others are vague and indistinct. Although a common experience, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these differences remain poorly understood. A prevailing explanation for what makes mental representations vivid is their shared properties with visual perception. However, recent research has shown that semantic properties of stimuli strongly influence their representations. To determine the extent to which visual and/or semantic properties influence memory vividness, we first examined whether individual stimuli reliably elicit similar subjective feelings of vividness across different subjects. Next, we explored how vividness relates to visual (i.e., color and brightness) and semantic (i.e., taxonomic category) properties of naturalistic images (Experiment 1). We found that vividness ratings were consistent across subjects; crucially, this consistency depended not only on the visual properties of the stimuli but also on their semantic properties. Next, we used neural networks to model visual, visuo-semantic, and semantic stimulus representations, selecting stimuli according to their distinctiveness in each representational format (Experiment 2). Our results showed that stimuli selected for their semantic and visuo-semantic properties reliably elicited vivid memories. Finally, we demonstrated that even in a purely visual recall test (Experiment 3), where both encoding and retrieval operations focused exclusively on the visual properties of a mnemonic cue, memory vividness still depended on the integration of visual and semantic stimuli representations. Together, our findings demonstrate, at multiple levels of inference, the combined influence of perceptual and semantic properties in shaping the vividness of mental representations of past events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Giving people more time between encoding information elements into working memory improves immediate (i.e., working memory) and delayed (i.e., long-term memory) retrieval. This free-time benefit is often assumed to arise from processes that counteract forgetting of the just encoded item in working memory, suggesting that time has a retroactive effect. Contrary to these predictions, a few studies showed that free time between two items in a serial recall task benefits only the subsequent (to-be-encoded) items, yielding a proactive benefit in working memory. Here, we investigate whether working memory and long-term memory benefit from free time in the same way. In three experiments, we show that free time benefits the to-be-encoded items in working memory (proactive effect) with only a local retroactive effect for recently encoded items, whereas it mainly benefits already encoded items in long-term memory (retroactive benefit). These results challenge a single explanation of the free-time benefit for memory retention across short and long intervals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Social dominance orientation, or SDO, reflects a preference for group-based inequality and is one of the strongest predictors of a variety of political attitudes, including support for affirmative action, nationalism, and even support for torture. Yet how SDO emerges is unclear. Although some work suggests that SDO primarily forms around adolescence, the present set of studies suggests that SDO can emerge earlier in development and meaningfully shape how children view social inequality. Across three studies ( = 314), we show that children's (ages 5-12; = 7.75, = 1.58, 116 boys, 183 girls, 133 White, 47 Black, 24 Asian, 11 Hispanic/Latine, one Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 32 multiracial, 66 unreported) self-reported levels of SDO are associated with less desire to rectify inequality, lower likelihood to believe claims of inequality from low-status groups, and less sympathy for outgroup suffering. We also examine the role of group status and status essentialism in shaping SDO, finding some support that group status and status essentialism jointly influence self-reported SDO. These data also suggest that SDO and ingroup bias are different processes and highlight the utility of taking a developmental perspective to discuss how social dominance theory and social identity theory may be both conceptually and empirically distinguishable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Memory formation is a complex phenomenon shaped by various experiential traces, yet their exact contributions remain unclear. This study investigates the generation of false memories leveraging different data-driven computational models to independently quantify language-based and vision-based experiential knowledge, as extracted from large-scale databases consisting of 639 billion words and 15 million images, respectively. We then tested the effects of these knowledge sources in two false memory experiments, one employing images and the other words as stimuli. Our findings unveil both modality-independent and modality-dependent processes in the formation of memory traces. Indeed, we observed a contribution of both prior visual and linguistic knowledge regardless of the types of stimuli to be memorized. However, the extent of this contribution differed as a function of the modality tested: Visual prior knowledge is more influential in image-based tasks, while linguistic prior knowledge dominates in word-based tasks. This dual and modality-dependent contribution underscores the adaptive nature of memory processes, revealing the dynamic integration of diverse experiential traces in false memory formation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

One reason that Black and White individuals often have difficulties in their interactions may stem from differences in nonverbal communication styles (Bishop, 1979; Crago et al., 1997; J. N. Shelton et al., 2023; Varonis & Gass, 1985). Here, across four studies, we examine cultural differences in gesture, a form of nonverbal communication, in Black and White speakers. In Study 1, Black participants ( = 75) rated actors who gestured more as being more natural and White participants ( = 75) rated actors who gestured less as being more natural. In addition, Black actors were rated as being more natural when gesturing more, while White actors were rated as being more natural when gesturing less. Study 2 shows that when a Black talk show host speaks with a Black guest, he gestures more than when speaking with a White guest. Study 3 found that Black speakers ( = 25) gestured more frequently and used larger gestures compared to White speakers ( = 25). Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that Biracial Black/White speakers who had their Black identity primed ( = 32) gestured more frequently and used larger gestures than those who had their White identity primed ( = 22), suggesting that gesture is culturally tied to racial identity salience. Together, these studies suggest that there are culturally learned gesture styles based on racial group membership. Thus, gesture is an understudied aspect of interracial interactions that may influence comfort in cross-cultural communication between Black and White individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Opposing someone on a contentious sociopolitical issue often prompts criticism and conflict. People may be tempted to reduce such acrimony by expressing neutrality. Across 11 studies with North American samples, we find that, although people commonly express neutrality on controversial issues, observers are skeptical of others' neutrality, judging them as similarly moral as those who oppose them those who explicitly oppose them. Unpacking lay beliefs about why people express neutrality sheds light on this disjunction between responses to the neutral self versus the neutral other. Specifically, people render more favorable attributions for their own neutrality (e.g., true indecision) than do observers (e.g., apathy, strategic behavior). Therefore, while neutrality is an often-invoked strategy to manage impressions, it is unlikely to succeed in doing so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).