APA Content Activity
Below you will find the abstracts and citations from some recent journal articles. Following each abstract is a list of
statements from the body of the paper. Read the abstract to get a feeling for what the paper is about. Then, for each
statement, indicate which part of the paper it belongs to: Introduction, Methods (Participants, Materials, Procedure),
Results, or Discussion.
Jaswal, Croft, Setia, & Cole (2010). Young Children Have a Specific, Highly Robust Bias to Trust Testimony.
Psychological Science 21(10), 1541–1547.
Why are young children so willing to believe what they are told? In two studies, we investigated whether it is because of a
general, undifferentiated trust in other people or a more specific bias to trust testimony. In Study 1, 3-year-olds either
heard an experimenter claim that a sticker was in one location when it was actually in another or saw her place an arrow
on the empty location. All children searched in the wrong location initially, but those who heard the deceptive testimony
continued to be misled, whereas those who saw her mark the incorrect location with an arrow quickly learned to search in
the opposite location. In Study 2, children who could both see and hear a deceptive speaker were more likely to be misled
than those who could only hear her. Three-year-olds have a specific, highly robust bias to trust what people—particularly
visible speakers—say.
1. On each of eight test trials, the experimenter placed two differently colored cups on opposite ends of a tray and then
concealed them using a cardboard screen.
2. These results are important because they demonstrate that children’s willingness to believe what they are told reflects
a specific bias to trust testimony, rather than a generic, undifferentiated trust in other people.
3. We adapted the methodology used by Couillard and Woodward (1999) to investigate whether 3-year-olds’ willingness
to believe what they are told is the result of a general, undifferentiated trust in other people, or whether it stems from a
more specific trust in testimony.
4. As Figure 3 shows, none of the children in the video condition found the sticker on the first trial, and just 3 of the 16
children in the audio condition did so.
5. The mechanisms by which children learn to become more skeptical and the sources of individual differences in
credulity remain intriguing questions for future work.
Kesebir & Oishi (2010). A Spontaneous Self-Reference Effect in Memory: Why Some Birthdays Are Harder to
Remember Than Others. Psychological Science 21(10), 1525–1531.
The self-reference effect in memory is defined as the memory advantage for materials that have been processed in
relation to the self. Existing demonstrations of the self-reference effect rely on laboratory stimuli and use explicit cues to
prompt self- relevant encoding. In three studies, we used participants’ memories for birthdays to document a naturalistic
case of the self- reference effect that did not depend on explicit self-cues. In Study 1, the birthdays that participants freerecalled were closer on average to their own birthday than would be expected by chance. In Study 2, participants were
more likely to remember the birthday of a friend if the friend’s birthday was close to their own, and they were more likely to
forget the friend’s birthday if it was distant. In Study 3, we demonstrated experimentally that the self-reference effect
occurs for newly introduced individuals. Our findings suggest that the self-reference effect can occur spontaneously in the
absence of explicit self-cues if the material to be learned automatically activates self-relevant information.
1. Participants were 125 University of Virginia undergraduate students (101 women, 23 men, and 1 who did not provide
gender data) who participated in the study to complete a course requirement.
2. One possible extension of our findings is that a memory advantage may also apply to birthdays that are close to other
important dates in people’s lives, such as important anniversaries or birthdays of close relatives and friends.
3. This article examines the boundary conditions and ecological validity of another such phenomenon—the selfreference effect in memory.
4. We found that this averaged birthday difference among 125 participants (M = 2.9871 months) was nearly identical to
the simulated value (M = 2.9989 months), t(7749) = 0.59, n.s.
5. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three studies.
Kuhn, Kourkoulou, & Leekam (2010). How Magic Changes Our Expectations About Autism. Psychological
Science 21(10), 1487–1493.
In the vanishing-ball illusion, the magician’s social cues misdirect the audience’s expectations and attention so that
the audience “sees” a ball vanish in the air. Because individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less
sensitive to social cues and have superior perception for nonsocial details compared with typically developing
individuals, we predicted that they would be less susceptible to the illusion. Surprisingly, the opposite result was
found, as individuals with ASD were more susceptible to the illusion than a comparison group. Eye-tracking data
indicated that subtle temporal delays in allocating attention might explain their heightened susceptibility. Additionally,
although individuals with ASD showed typical patterns of looking to the magician’s face and eyes, they were slower to
launch their first saccade to the face and had difficulty in fixating the fast-moving observable ball. Considered
together, the results indicate that individuals with ASD have difficulties in rapidly allocating attention toward both
people and moving objects.
1. Although most individuals are deceived by the vanishing- ball illusion, there are several reasons to predict that one
group of individuals, those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), might be less susceptible to the illusion.
2. Our findings therefore show that magic can change expectations about autism, and autism can also change
expectations about magic.
3. Fifteen individuals with ASD (12 males and 3 females; ages 17–22 years) were recruited from a special college for
autism.
4. First, they were presented with an image of the final frame of the video clip and asked to mark the location at which
they saw the ball for the last time.
5. The movies were displayed on a 21-in. CRT monitor (75 Hz).
Emberson, Lupyan, Goldstein, & Spivey (2010). Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is
More Distracting. Psychological Science 21(10), 1383–1388.
Why are people more irritated by nearby cell-phone conversations than by conversations between two people who are
physically present? Overhearing someone on a cell phone means hearing only half of a conversation—a “halfalogue.”
We show that merely overhearing a halfalogue results in decreased performance on cognitive tasks designed to
reflect the attentional demands of daily activities. By contrast, overhearing both sides of a cell-phone conversation or
a monologue does not result in decreased performance. This may be because the content of a halfalogue is less
predictable than both sides of a conversation. In a second experiment, we controlled for differences in acoustic factors
between these types of overheard speech, establishing that it is the unpredictable informational content of halfalogues
that results in distraction. Thus, we provide a cognitive explanation for why overheard cell-phone conversations are
especially irritating: Less-predictable speech results in more distraction for a listener engaged in other tasks.
1. The current findings demonstrate that simply overhearing a cell-phone conversation is sufficient to reduce
performance in concurrent, attentionally demanding tasks that were designed to reflect two attentional
components of driving.
2. An ANOVA comparing results for the silent and halfalogue conditions in Experiments 1 and 2 (comprehensible vs.
filtered speech) revealed a marginally significant interac- tion between experiment and condition, F(1, 39) = 3.32,
p = .076.
3. Participants were asked to track a moving dot using a computer mouse.
4. On the basis of these claims that predictability of information widely influences human behavior, we hypothesized
that the relative unpredictability of a halfalogue will draw on limited attentional resources, resulting in poorer
performance in concur- rent tasks.
5. The finding that relative predictability of ambient speech has significant behavioral impact is consistent with the
broader theoretical view that the goal of perceptual-cognitive systems is to reduce uncertainty (Friston & Kiebel,
2009).