The 10 most-cited articles in Psychological Science, 2023

Recent evidence shows that AI-generated faces are now indistinguishable from human faces. However, algorithms are trained disproportionately on White faces, and thus White AI faces may appear especially realistic. In Experiment 1 ( N = 124 adults), alongside our reanalysis of previously published data, we showed that White AI faces are judged as human more often than actual human faces—a phenomenon we term AI hyperrealism. Paradoxically, people who made the most errors in this task were the most confident (a Dunning-Kruger effect). In Experiment 2 ( N = 610 adults), we used face-space theory and participant qualitative reports to identify key facial attributes that distinguish AI from human faces but were misinterpreted by participants, leading to AI hyperrealism. However, the attributes permitted high accuracy using machine learning. These findings illustrate how psychological theory can inform understanding of AI outputs and provide direction for debiasing AI algorithms, thereby promoting the ethical use of AI.

Much of human learning happens through interaction with other people, but little is known about how this process is reflected in the brains of students and teachers. Here, we concurrently recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data from nine groups, each of which contained four students and a teacher. All participants were young adults from the northeast United States. Alpha-band (8-12 Hz) brain-to-brain synchrony between students predicted both immediate and delayed posttest performance. Further, brain-to-brain synchrony was higher in specific lecture segments associated with questions that students answered correctly. Brain-to-brain synchrony between students and teachers predicted learning outcomes at an approximately 300-ms lag in the students' brain activity relative to the teacher's brain activity, which is consistent with the time course of spoken-language comprehension. These findings provide key new evidence for the importance of collecting brain data simultaneously from groups of learners in ecologically valid settings.

U.S. police departments have attempted to address racial inequities in policing with diversity training. However, little research has evaluated whether these trainings are effective at changing officers’ beliefs, motivations, and actions. To examine their efficacy, we tested a day-long implicit-bias-oriented diversity training designed to increase U.S. police officers’ knowledge of biases, concerns about bias, and use of evidence-based strategies to mitigate bias (total N = 3,764). The training was immediately effective at increasing knowledge about bias, concerns about bias, and intentions to address bias, relative to baseline. However, the effects were fleeting. Although the training was linked to higher knowledge for at least 1 month, it was ineffective at durably increasing concerns or strategy use. These findings suggest that diversity trainings as they are currently practiced are unlikely to change police behavior. We conclude with theorizing about what organizations and training programs could do for greater impact.

Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by other people. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional MRI of 66 first-year university students to unobtrusively measure the relative alignment of people's mental processing of naturalistic stimuli and tested whether lonely people actually process the world in idiosyncratic ways. We found evidence for such idiosyncrasy: Lonely individuals' neural responses were dissimilar to those of their peers, particularly in regions of the default-mode network in which similar responses have been associated with shared perspectives and subjective understanding. These relationships persisted when we controlled for demographic similarities, objective social isolation, and individuals' friendships with each other. Our findings raise the possibility that being surrounded by people who see the world differently from oneself, even if one is friends with them, may be a risk factor for loneliness.

In April 2019, Psychological Science published its first issue in which all Research Articles received the Open Data badge. We used that issue to investigate the effectiveness of this badge, focusing on the adherence to its aim at Psychological Science : sharing both data and code to ensure reproducibility of results. Twelve researchers of varying experience levels attempted to reproduce the results of the empirical articles in the target issue (at least three researchers per article). We found that all 14 articles provided at least some data and six provided analysis code, but only one article was rated to be exactly reproducible, and three were rated as essentially reproducible with minor deviations. We suggest that researchers should be encouraged to adhere to the higher standard in force at Psychological Science . Moreover, a check of reproducibility during peer review may be preferable to the disclosure method of awarding badges.

When recalling memories, we often scan information-rich continuous episodes, e.g., to find our keys. How does our brain access and search through naturalistic memories? We suggest that high-level structure, marked by event boundaries, guides us through this process. We present a computational model where memory-scanning is sped up by ``skipping ahead’’ to the next event boundary upon reaching a decision-threshold. Using a movie (normed for event boundaries; study 1), we then prompt participants to perform memory-scanning of movie-segments for target answers (study 2) and mental simulation (study 3) of these segments (total N=601 adults across studies). Confirming model predictions, memory-scanning times were a function of the number of event boundaries within a segment and the distance of the search-target to the previous boundary. Mental simulation times were also described by a skipping-process, but with a higher skipping-threshold than memory-scanning. These findings identify event boundaries as access points to naturalistic memory.

Rooted in the novel and the mysterious, awe is a common experience in childhood, but research is almost silent with respect to the import of this emotion for children. Awe makes individuals feel small, thereby shifting their attention to the social world. Here, we studied the effects of art-elicited awe on children’s prosocial behavior toward an out-group and its unique physiological correlates. In two preregistered studies (Study 1: N = 159, Study 2: N = 353), children between 8 and 13 years old viewed movie clips that elicited awe, joy, or a neutral (control) response. Children who watched the awe-eliciting clip were more likely to spend their time on an effortful task (Study 1) and to donate their experimental earnings (Studies 1 and 2), all toward benefiting refugees. They also exhibited increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia, an index of parasympathetic nervous system activation associated with social engagement. We discuss implications for fostering prosociality by reimagining children’s environments to inspire awe at a critical age.

Little is known about historical shifts in subjective age (i.e., how old individuals feel). Moving beyond the very few time-lagged cross-sectional cohort comparisons, we examined historical shifts in within-person trajectories of subjective age from midlife to advanced old age. We used cohort-comparative longitudinal data from middle-age and older adults in the German Ageing Survey ( N = 14,928; ~50% female) who lived in Germany and were between 40 and 85 years old when entering the study. They provided up to seven observations over 24 years. Results revealed that being born later in historical time is associated with feeling younger by 2% every birth-year decade and with less intraindividual change toward an older subjective age. Women reported feeling younger than men; this gender gap widened across cohorts. The association of higher education with younger subjective age became weaker across cohorts. Potential reasons for the subjective-rejuvenation effect across cohorts are discussed.

Categorization has a deep impact on behavior, but whether category learning is served by a single system or multiple systems remains debated. Here, we designed two well-equated nonspeech auditory category learning challenges to draw on putative procedural (information-integration) versus declarative (rule-based) learning systems among adult Hebrew-speaking control participants and individuals with dyslexia, a language disorder that has been linked to a selective disruption in the procedural memory system and in which phonological deficits are ubiquitous. We observed impaired information-integration category learning and spared rule-based category learning in the dyslexia group compared with the neurotypical group. Quantitative model-based analyses revealed reduced use of, and slower shifting to, optimal procedural-based strategies in dyslexia with hypothesis-testing strategy use on par with control participants. The dissociation is consistent with multiple category learning systems and points to the possibility that procedural learning inefficiencies across categories defined by…