Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information seeking about COVID-19 exposure risk. In Study 1 (N=221,829), we conducted a large-scale social media field study. Using Facebook advertisements, we targeted users by age and political attitudes. Episodic specificity drove engagement: Advertisements that contextualized risk in specific scenarios produced the highest click-through rates, across all demographic groups. In Study 2, we replicated and extended our findings in an online experiment (N=4,233). Message specificity (but not self-relevance or emotional valence) drove interest in learning about COVID-19 risks. Across both studies, we found that older adults and liberals were more interested in learning about COVID-19 risks. However, message specificity increased engagement across demographic groups. Overall, evoking specific scenarios motivated information seeking about COVID-19, facilitating risk communication to a broad audience.

Young children are growing up in an increasingly complicated digital world. Laboratory-based research shows it is cognitively demanding to process and transfer information presented on screens during early childhood. Multiple explanations for this cognitive challenge have been proposed. This review provides an updated comprehensive framework that integrates prior theoretical explanations to develop new testable hypotheses. The review also considers the how the research can be generalized to the "wild" where children engage with multiple commercial products daily. It includes real-world applications for improving children's learning and memory from screen-based media by adding supportive cues and reducing distraction and interference. The review concludes with a call for future collaborative research between researchers, content developers, and families to better understand age-related changes in both short-term and long-term learning from digital media. Finally, policy makers need to be involved to ensure equitable access and to create a safe digital space for all families.

Corrected misinformation can continue to influence inferential reasoning. It has been suggested that such continued influence is partially driven by misinformation familiarity, and that corrections should therefore avoid repeating misinformation to avoid inadvertent strengthening of misconceptions. However, evidence for such familiarity-backfire effects is scarce. We tested whether familiarity backfire may occur if corrections are processed under cognitive load. Although misinformation repetition may boost familiarity, load may impede integration of the correction, reducing its effectiveness and therefore allowing a backfire effect to emerge. Participants listened to corrections that repeated misinformation while in a driving simulator. Misinformation familiarity was manipulated through the number of corrections. Load was manipulated through a math task administered selectively during correction encoding. Multiple corrections were more effective than a single correction; cognitive load reduced correction effectiveness, with a single correction entirely ineffective under load. This provides further evidence against familiarity-backfire effects and has implications for real-world debunking.

Imagining helping a person in need increases one's willingness to help beyond levels evoked by passively reading the same stories. We examined whether episodic simulation can increase younger and older adults' willingness to help in novel scenarios posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 3 studies we demonstrate that episodic simulation of helping behavior increases younger and older adults' willingness to help during both everyday and COVID-related scenarios. Moreover, we show that imagining helping increases emotional concern, scene imagery, and theory of mind, which in turn relate to increased willingness to help. Studies 2 and 3 also showed that people produce more internal, episodic-like details when imagining everyday compared to COVID-related scenarios, suggesting that people are less able to draw on prior experiences when simulating such novel events. These findings suggest that encouraging engagement with stories of people in need by imagining helping can increase willingness to help during the pandemic.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.jarmac.2021.07.010.].

The five commentaries on the target article "Generalizations: The Grail and the Gremlins" (Bauer, 2023) provide food for thought on the issue of generalizations in psychological science. Generally speaking, there seems to be agreement in the field that unrecognized limits on the generalizability of the findings of psychological science research are a matter of serious concern. This reply to the commentaries features elaboration of this basic point of agreement as well as discussion of other points of convergence with the arguments in the target article. The reply also addresses areas of divergence between the target article and the commentaries, and among the commentaries themselves. The reply develops suggestions for ways forward inspired by the commentaries. Echoing the target article, the reply calls for greater authenticity in psychological science research, movement toward which would strengthen efforts along the full range of inquiry, from basic to applied.

Urgent attention is needed to address generalizability problems in psychology. However, the current dominant paradigm centered on dichotomous results and rapid discoveries cannot provide the solution because of its theoretical inadequacies. We propose a paradigm shift towards a model-centric science, which provides the sophistication to understanding the sources of generalizability and promote systematic exploration. In a model-centric paradigm, scientific activity involves iteratively building and refining theoretical, empirical, and statistical models that communicate with each other. This approach is transparent, and efficient in addressing generalizability issues. We illustrate the nature of scientific activity in a model-centric system and its potential for advancing the field of psychology.

Over two decades ago, I proposed that memory errors could be classified into seven basic categories or sins (Schacter, 1999, 2001), comprising three sins of omission (transience, absentmindedness, and blocking) and four sins of commission (misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence). In the past two decades, much has been learned about the nature and basis of the memory sins. Here, I assess the extent of progress that has been made during that time regarding applied implications of five of the sins: transience, absentmindedness, misattribution, suggestibility, and persistence. The manifestations of these sins have been examined in a variety of applied settings, including educational, clinical, legal, and technological domains. I argue that considerable progress has been made in characterizing the impact of memory sins in each domain, identify gaps in and limitations of our current knowledge, and briefly consider how these developments bear on broad questions regarding the reliability of human memory.

Mutualistic theories assume that the mastering of a skill, either cognitive or academic, supports and amplifies the development of other such abilities. The current study uses network science to model cross-sectional associations between cognitive and academic performance in two age-matched developmental cohorts. One cohort was a community sample drawn from the general school population, while the other included struggling learners. The community sample outperformed the struggling learners across all measures. Network models suggested that although the tasks were similarly interrelated across cohorts, there were some notable differences in association strength: Academic skills were more closely coupled in the community sample, while maths was more strongly related to cognitive skills in the struggling learners. We demonstrate the utility of network models as an analytic framework that is consistent with contemporary theories of learning difficulties and the nature of the relationship between cognitive and learning skills more broadly.

The consequences of profound disruption to everyday life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will only emerge over time. Guided by ecological systems (Pitchik et al., 2021) and developmental psychopathology (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010) frameworks, I review evidence that points to parents at home with children as particularly vulnerable to increased psychological difficulties, particularly in contexts of poverty. Resultant compromised parenting may reduce children's opportunities for the kinds of everyday interactions that promote cognitive and socioemotional development and expose them to increases in coercive, avoidant, and other problematic caregiving behaviours. I discuss three evidence-based strategies that parents could adopt to buffer their child's mental health: building positive discipline strategies, talking with the child about the pandemic and its consequences, and conversing about the past. I conclude, however, that approaches to supporting parents and their children at this time must also address multisystem factors that compromise caregivers' ability to provide nurturing care.

Risky decision-making lies at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic and will determine future viral outbreaks. Therefore, a critical evaluation of major explanations of such decision-making is of acute practical importance. We review the underlying mechanisms and predictions offered by expectancy-value and dual-process theories. We then highlight how fuzzy-trace theory builds on these approaches and provides further insight into how knowledge, emotions, values, and metacognitive inhibition influence risky decision-making through its unique mental representational architecture (i.e., parallel verbatim and gist representations of information). We discuss how social values relate to decision-making according to fuzzy-trace theory, including how categorical gist representations cue core values. Although gist often supports health-promoting behaviors such as vaccination, social distancing, and mask-wearing, why this is not always the case as with status-quo gist is explained, and suggestions are offered for how to overcome the "battle for the gist" as it plays out in social media.

People generally believe that their own future will be better than the one of comparable others. Robust evidence documents such unrealistic optimism in many domains of life. Here, we examine how unrealistic optimism may affect people's risk assessments of COVID-19 infection as well as their attitudes regarding behaviours intended to protect against contagion. In two studies conducted in the USA ( = 160) and UK ( = 161), at different times during the pandemic, we show that participants considered the likelihood of contracting and carrying the infection lower for themselves and their close other compared to an acquaintance, while they considered the likelihood of engaging in protective behaviours higher for themselves and their close other than an acquaintance. The findings document unrealistic optimism in relation to COVID-19. Such biases are particularly critical in relation to infectious diseases, where underestimating the risk for both oneself and close others may reduce precautions and increase virus spreading.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, defendants and witnesses (as well as the prosecution and defense counsel) may wear medical face masks to prevent the spread of the virus. Alternatively, courtrooms proceedings may take place virtually. In this article, we discuss how these deviations from normal procedures may affect jurors' lie detection ability and decision-making. Although research addressing this specific question does not exist, we are able to formulate an informed view based on the extensive deception literature. Since nonverbal signs of deception in the face and body are virtually absent, we conclude that medical face mask-wearing or virtual courtroom proceedings will not hamper jurors' lie detection abilities. If jurors can hear the speech well, they may become better at detecting deception if they pay more attention to speech content, which may occur as a result of mask-wearing in the courtroom.

How do we resolve conflicting ideas about how to protect our health during a pandemic? Prior knowledge influences our decisions, potentially creating implicit cognitive conflict with new, correct information. COVID-19 provides a natural condition for investigating how an individual's health-specific knowledge (e.g., understanding mask efficacy) and their personal context (e.g., outbreak proximity) influence their protective health behavior endorsement, as information about the virus, its spread, and lethality has changed over time. Using a dual-process-model framework, we investigated the role cognitive conflict has on health decision-making. We used a computer mouse-tracking paradigm alongside geographical information systems (GIS) as a proxy for context. The results support a contextualized-deficit-model framework in which relevant knowledge and context-based factors help individuals override cognitive conflict to make more preventative health decisions. Findings from this study may provide evidence for a more effective way for experts to combat non-adherence due to conflicting health information.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a surge of health misinformation, which has had serious consequences including direct harm and opportunity costs. We investigated ( = 678) the impact of such misinformation on hypothetical demand (i.e., willingness-to-pay) for an unproven treatment, and propensity to promote (i.e., like or share) misinformation online. This is a novel approach, as previous research has used mainly questionnaire-based measures of reasoning. We also tested two interventions to counteract the misinformation, contrasting a tentative refutation based on materials used by health authorities with an enhanced refutation based on best-practice recommendations. We found prior exposure to misinformation increased misinformation promotion (by 18%). Both tentative and enhanced refutations reduced demand (by 18% and 25%, respectively) as well as misinformation promotion (by 29% and 55%). The fact that enhanced refutations were more effective at curbing promotion of misinformation highlights the need for debunking interventions to follow current best-practice guidelines.

Previous research has revealed that people from Western cultures tend to remember more details of objects and events in autobiographical memory compared to people from Eastern cultures. The present experiments tested whether differences in pattern separation - the process by which new, but potentially similar, exemplars are discriminated from previously-encountered exemplars - account for these cultural difference in object memory. In two experiments, we investigated the extent to which North Americans and East Asians differ in pattern separation and whether these effects are related to cultural values. We also examined the role of response bias. These results revealed it is unlikely that pattern separation is the sole mechanism underlying cross-cultural memory specificity differences, as broader memory mechanisms, such as differences in memory resolution for previously-encoded items, could account for the differences observed between groups.

Though tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states are traditionally viewed as instances of retrieval failure, some suggest that they are a unique form of retrieval success. The state indicates the presence of relevant in memory as opposed to nothing. TOTs potentially present an opportunity to indicate that more knowledge is present than is currently accessible, which might have relevance for how tests are designed. The present study investigated this. During TOT states, participants were more likely to risk requesting a later multiple-choice set of potential answers when a point loss penalty for wrong answers would occur; they were also more likely to actually choose the correct multiple-choice answer. A test designed for differential point gain or loss through strategic use of TOT states during word generation failure resulted in a point gain advantage compared to standard multiple-choice type testing. This pattern presents a proof of concept relevant to designing adaptive tests.