Social gaze-following consists of both reflexive and volitionalcontrol mechanisms of saccades, similar to those evaluated inthe antisaccade task. This similarity makes gaze-following anideal medium for studying attention in a social context. Thepresent study seeks to utilize reflexive gaze-following to de-velop a social paradigm for measuring attention control. Weevaluate two gaze-following variations of the antisaccade task.In version 1, participants are cued with still images of a socialpartner looking either left or right. In version 2, participantsare cued with videos of a social partner shifting their gaze tothe left or right. As with the traditional antisaccade task, par-ticipants were required to look in the opposite direction of thetarget stimuli (i.e., gaze cues). Performance on the new gaze-following antisaccade tasks are compared to the traditional an-tisaccade task and the highly related ability of working mem-ory.

Despite widespread political conspiracy theories about Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, a majority of partisans continue to distance themselves from such beliefs. Even so, the ideological biases that drive conspiratorial thinking may be hard to overcome. In this study, we examine the unintentional endorsement of conspiratorial beliefs as revealed in movement dynamics. We track the cursor movements of Republicans and Democrats as they click target regions on their computer screens, ostensibly providing bias-free opinions (e.g., clicking “FALSE” upon reading “Barack Obama was born in Kenya”). However, during these response movements, we find inhibition and movement attraction to regions of the screen where a competitor response is located (e.g., “TRUE” for the “birther” conspiracy). These dynamics are not present for general conspiracies or political knowledge items. Though both Republicans and Democrats show evidence of implicit biases, changes in the strength of competition also reveal key asymmetrical differences.

Visual memory for naturalistic scenes is mediated by: amount of exposure, semantic content, and type of encoding. These factors might interactively contribute to scene memorability. Thus, we tracked computer-mouse movements during an encoding phase where participants verified the congruency of sentence and scene pairs, which varied in plausibility. The presentation time of the scenes was also manipulated. Subsequently, in an unexpected recognition phase, participants had to indicate whether they remembered scenes (old and new). Recognition improved when correct verifications were made during encoding especially: when the scene was implausible, the stimuli pair congruent, and for longer presentation times. When comparing the trajectories between encoding and recognition, we found greater hesitancy during encoding, especially for implausible scenes in incongruent pairs, decreasing as presentation time increased. These results provide novel insights into the factors modulating the memorability of naturalistic scenes.

Co-creating meaning in conversation is challenging. Success is often determined by people’s abilities to coordinate their language in strategic ways to signal problems and to align mental representations. Here we explore one set of grounding mechanisms, known as interactive linguistic alignment, that makes use of the ways people re-use, i.e., “align to,” the lexical, semantic, and syntactic forms of others’ utterances. In particular, the focus is on the temporal development of multi-level linguistic alignment and examine how its expression is related to communicative outcomes within a unique collaborative problem-solving paradigm. The primary task, situated within an educational video game, requires creative thinking between three people where the paths for possible solutions are highly variable. We find that over time interactions are marked by decreasing lexical and syntactic alignment, with a trade-off of increasing semantic alignment. However, a greater semantic alignment does not necessarily translate into better team performance. Overall, these findings provide greater clarity on the role of grounding mechanisms in complex and dynamic collaborative problem-solving tasks.

It is commonly agreed that, in most scenarios, deception involves cognitive demands. Prime amongst these demandsis competition between a default true response and an alternative false response. What is less understood are issuessurrounding the mechanistic underpinnings of how and when this competition enacts its influence during responding. Inprevious work (Duran, Dale, & McNamara, 2011), we have used an action dynamics paradigm to capture millisecond-timing information in how people use their mouse movements to respond yes or no to autobiographical information. Inthe current study, we employed a similar paradigm to collect response data from hundreds of anonymous participants,who freely used an interactive touchscreen exhibit at a public science museum exhibit, aiming to replicate and extendour previous findings. As expected, during false responding, the truth appears to be initially activated and dissipatescontinuously over the course of the response.