Truth from familiar turns of phrase: Word and number collocations in the corpus of language influence acceptance of novel claims

Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective

Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, predicting sensory input on the basis of prior experience and updating predictions on the basis of the incoming prediction error. According to the proposed account, metacognitive feelings arise out of a process in which visceral changes serve as cues to predict the error dynamics relating to a particular mental process. The expected rate of prediction-error reduction corresponds to the valence at the core of the emerging metacognitive feeling. Metacognitive feelings use prediction dynamics to model the agent's situation in a way that is both descriptive and directive. Thus, metacognitive feelings are not only an appraisal of ongoing cognitive performance but also a set of action policies. These action policies span predictive trajectories across bodily action, mental action, and interoceptive changes, which together transform the epistemic landscape within which metacognitive feelings unfold.

Should I have been more careful or less careless? The comparative nature of counterfactual thoughts alters judgments of their impact

Counterfactual thoughts inherently imply a comparison of a given reality to an alternative state of affairs. Previous research mainly considered consequences of different counterfactual types, namely focus (other vs. self), structure (additive vs. subtractive), and direction (upward vs. downward). The current work investigates whether a 'more-than' versus 'less-than' comparative nature of counterfactual thoughts alters judgments of their impact. Four experiments demonstrated that self-generated other- (Studies 1 and 3) and self-focused (Study 2) upward counterfactuals are judged more impactful when they entail 'more-than' rather than 'less-than' comparisons. Judgments include plausibility and persuasiveness, as well as counterfactuals' likelihood to change future behavior and feelings. Self-reported ease of thought generation and (dis)fluency gauged by difficulty in thought generation was similarly affected. This more-less asymmetry reversed in Study 3 for downward counterfactual thoughts, with 'less-than' counterfactuals being judged more impactful and easier to generate. Further attesting to the role of ease, when spontaneously generating comparative counterfactuals, participants correctly provided more 'more-than' upward counterfactuals, but more 'less-than' downward counterfactuals (Study 4). These findings delineate one of the to date few conditions for a reversal of the more-less asymmetry and provide support for a correspondence principle, the simulation heuristic, and thus the role of ease in counterfactual thinking. They suggest that especially 'more-than' counterfactuals following negative events, and 'less-than' counterfactuals following positive events, are likely to have an important impact on people. (226 words).

Dimensions of uncertainty communication: What is conveyed by verbal terms and numeric ranges

The paper reviews two strands of research on communication of uncertainty that usually have been investigated separately: (1) Probabilities attached to specific outcomes, and (2) Range judgments. Probabilities are sometimes expressed by verbal phrases ("rain is likely") and at other times in a numeric format ("70% chance of rain"), whereas range judgments describe the potential amounts expected ("1-4 mm of rain"). Examination of previous research shows that both descriptions convey, in addition to the strength of expectations, pragmatic information about the communicative situation. For instance, so-called verbal probability expressions (VPE), as likely, unlikely, a chance, or not certain give some, albeit vague, probabilistic information, but carry in addition an implicit message about the sources of uncertainty, the outcome's valence and severity, along with information about the speakers' attitudes and their communicative intentions. VPEs are directional by drawing attention either to an outcome's occurrence ("it is possible") or to its non-occurrence ("it is doubtful"). In this sense they may be more informative than numbers. Uncertainties about outcomes in a distribution (continuous quantities) are alternatively expressed as interval estimates. The width of such intervals can function as a cue to credibility and expertise. Incomplete, one-sided intervals, where only one boundary is stated, imply directionality. "More than 100 people" suggests a crowd, while "less than 200" implies a shortfall. As with VPEs, directionally positive intervals are more frequent, and perhaps more neutral than negative ones. To convey expectancies and uncertainty in a balanced way, communicators may have to alternate between complementary frames.