The Mastermind effect - psychologists boost students' general knowledge using priming placebo

Believing a treatment will work, even if in reality it is entirely inert, can lead to profound beneficial changes. This is the wonder of the placebo effect and most of us have heard it discussed in relation to helping people with physical ailments.

Less explored is the potential the effect could have in other contexts. There are some examples, such as a paper published two years ago by Sophie Parker showing that memory performance was enhanced when participants thought they'd taken a cognition-enhancing drug, even though they hadn't. However, this still has parallels with a medical placebo because of the use of a sham drug.

Now Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan have gone a step further, by showing that a drug-free placebo intervention boosted the general knowledge performance of a group of students. Pub quizzes might never be the same again!

The researchers started by showing 20 participants the answer on-screen to several multiple-choice test items, just prior to the arrival of each of the questions (examples included Pi, and the painter of La Guernica). Next, the researchers gradually reduced the time the answers were presented, until they became completely invisible. This was to demonstrate the principle of subliminal presentation and laid the ground for the experiment proper.

For the real test, involving a new set of 20 questions, Weger and Loughnan told the same participants that for each test item, the correct answer would be presented to them subliminally beforehand, just as in the earlier demonstration. "We further advised them that although they could no longer consciously recognise what was written, their unconscious would still be able to pick up the correct answer," the researchers explained, adding that they told the participants to go with their intuition because "on some level you already know the answer". In reality, however, no answers were presented subliminally, just random letter strings. The researchers call this a "bogus priming method". Participants gave their answers via a paper sheet.

The key finding is that the test performance of the placebo participants significantly outstripped the performance of a control group of twenty students who undertook the test prelims, but were not told the answers would be shown to them subliminally during the test proper (average 9.85 correct out of 20 vs. 8.37 correct; a large effect size of d=0.813). The average age of the 40 participants was 20 years and there were 32 women. The priming placebo effect held when controlling for participant age and gender.

What was going on? The placebo intervention "cannot have expanded the individual's knowledge or storage capacities," the researchers said. "What is more likely to have happened is a weakening of inhibitory mechanisms that normally impair performance on a task - for example, self-incapacitating anxieties that previously taxed cognitive resources." The placebo might also have "primed a success orientation," the researchers said, which may have affected the participants' behaviour accordingly, including increasing their persistence.

Weger and Loughnan are excited about the possibilities their placebo approach might have for testing people's performance in situations where their anxiety might otherwise interfere with achieving their true potential. The real life benefits of this new test-performance placebo will likely depend on the duration of its effect, something the researchers plan to test in future research. Another issue for applying these findings in real life is whether the effect still occurs when people know the trick (at least one previous study has documented a placebo effect that can work without deception). The researchers are optimistic - "we speculate that even the one-off realisation to have skills and resources that the participant was not previously aware of can be a significant insight that may alter the individual's self-perception and self-talk."

Skeptics will no doubt be concerned about the small size of the sample in the current study and the narrow demonstration of the effect. There's clearly a need for replications! As Weber and Loughnan acknowledged, we also need to know more about the mechanisms underlying the improved test performance.

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Weger, U., and Loughnan, S. (2013). Mobilizing unused resources: Using the placebo concept to enhance cognitive performance. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66 (1), 23-28 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.751117 

--Further reading--

Unleash the crowd within
Resilient, friendly people are more responsive to placebo treatment

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

- Thanks to Marc Brysbaert at Ghent University for the tip-off (he'd love it if you took part in this word association test). 

- The journal publishers at Psychology Press are in the process of making this paper open-access. 

- Thanks to Jon Sutton for the Mastermind moniker.

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

More clues to successful ageing from the study of "super-agers" (previous Digest post on Super-Agers).

Does Posting Facebook Status Updates Increase or Decrease Loneliness?

Being men with eating disorders: Perspectives of male eating disorder service-users

Improving multi-tasking ability through action video games

Modifying Memory: Selectively Enhancing and Updating Personal Memories for a Museum Tour by Reactivating Them

The effects of news stories on the stigma of mental illness.

The home advantage in individual sports: An augmented review

Dr. Phil and Psychology Today as Self-Help Treatments of Mental Illness: A Content Analysis of Popular Psychology Programming.

Perspective Taking With Future Humans Improves Environmental Engagement

Women more likely to share their number with a handsome stranger when it's sunny.

The desire for healthy limb amputation: structural brain correlates and clinical features of xenomelia.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How to design a street that's mentally rejuvenating

More people worldwide now live in cities than in the countryside. Combined with sprawl and the loss of urban green spaces, this means that many of us are unable to enjoy the restorative effects of a natural setting. But what's to say the built environment, designed well, can't have a rejuvenating effect too? "The built environment can be more beautiful than nature," the British planning minister said recently, "and we shouldn’t obsess about the fact that the only landscapes that are beautiful are open — sometimes buildings are better."

What's clear is we need more research on the psychological effects of urban design. Sadly, planning, architecture and psychology tend not to speak to one other. A new study takes us a step in the right direction. Pall Lindal and  Terry Hartig presented hundreds of Icelandic participants with dozens of computer-designed residential, terraced streetspaces that varied in two main ways - the degree of variety and complexity in the building design, in terms of the ornateness of the roofline and facades; and building height, which varied from one to three stories.

Participants were asked to imagine that they were walking down the street, mentally exhausted after work. They then rated each streetscape in terms of its restorative potential, how much they liked it, its "fascination" (how much it offers the chance to explore and discover), and its ability to give a break from routine (what the researchers called "being away").

Examples of streets judged to have least (left), medium, and maximum (right) restorative power. 

Greater architectural variation in the street scene and lower building height both contributed to the perception that the environment was restorative - allowing the participants to "rest and recover their abilities to focus". Greater architectural variety also tended to go hand in hand with a greater sense of fascination and with "being away" (although not with preference), factors which explained the link with perceived restorative power. In contrast, higher buildings were associated with a diminished sense of "being away" and were judged less restorative.

The findings make sense in terms of increased building intricacy and variety allowing the mind to alight on the visual scene, find interest, and therefore disengage from prior mental toils and challenges. Excess building height, on the other hand, fosters a sense of too much enclosure, which clashes with our instinctual preference for a minimal level of openness - possibly an evolutionary hang-over allowing us to notice predators.

Although this study is a welcome contribution to the psychology of architecture, it suffers from numerous limitations. Among these is the fact most of the Icelandic participants reported a lack of familiarity with urban scenes of this kind - results could be different in other countries. Also, the participants didn't experience actual streets, and only perceived, rather than actual, restorative powers were measured. Finally, the levels of architectural variety were minimal - no fewer than 50 per cent of the buildings in any scene were identical. Higher levels of variation could have an adverse effect.

Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said "their results affirm that densely built urban residential settings need not lack restorative quality, and that the design of the built environment can play a significant role in affecting perceptions regarding possibilities for restoration."

"Such information is needed in the effort to create urban environments that are sustainable in social and psychological terms," they added, "as well as in ecological terms."

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Lindal, P., and Hartig, T. (2013). Architectural variation, building height, and the restorative quality of urban residential streetscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 33, 26-36 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2012.09.003

--Further reading--

Is there a psychologist in the building?
Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?
Living in a city, or growing up in one, is associated with heightened brain sensitivity to social stress

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Are we now blasé about brain scans?

People are so awestruck by neuroscience, the briefest mention of brain-based jargon or glimpse of a brain scan is enough to send their critical faculties into a flutter. Or so they said. But now a new study finds that in fact most people are singularly non-wowed by the technical brilliance of brain scan images.

Robert Michael and his colleagues performed ten replication attempts of a hugely influential finding published in 2008. Back then David McCabe and Alan Castel reported that undergrad students were more persuaded by a neuroscience news story when it was accompanied by a picture of a brain scan, as compared with a bar chart or no image. The result is mentioned frequently in the popular press as evidence of our neuro-enthrallment. It receives about 40 scholarly citations a year, but until now no-one has checked if the effect is real.

Seven of Michael's ten replications were performed online, three with paper materials, together involving nearly 2000 participants, including members of the public and students. As in the McCabe and Castel study, participants read a news item about brain scans being used to detect criminals. Afterwards the participants said if they agreed with the story's conclusion that brain scans can be used as a lie detector.

Combining the results from the McCabe and Castel study with the new data, overall the presence of a brain scan in the news story had only a tiny effect on participants' answers. On a 4-point response scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree with the story), this reflected a shift of just 0.07 points or 2.4 per cent in agreement. "The image of the brain exerted little to no influence," the researchers said. The effect of the brain scan image didn't vary with the format of the study - online vs. paper. Participant age and education level also made no difference.

Past research outside of the neuroscience context has shown that images can make accompanying text more understandable and persuasive. The remarkable ineffectiveness of a brain scan in the current replications is therefore something of a puzzle. One explanation is that the impact of the image will vary according to the neuroscience training of the observer. "To people who may not understand how fMRI works, or even where the frontal lobes are, seeing an image of the brain may not be any more helpful than seeing an ink blot," the researchers said. Future research will need to test this.

Another possibility is that people have grown more sceptical of neuroscience since the 2008 McCabe and Castel finding was published. To test this possibility, Michael and his colleagues performed five online replications of another influential study - the 2008 discovery that people were more impressed by bad explanations when they contained gratuitous neuroscience language. This finding was replicated, arguing against the idea that people have become inoculated more generally against the persuasive power of neuroscience.

In the replications of McCabe and Castel, perhaps the addition of a brain scan image failed to make the lie detection news story more convincing because that story already contained persuasive neuroscience language. Regardless, this new paper adds to evidence showing the failure of brain images to sway jurors. And Michael's team said (quoting Martha Farah) it shows "the 'amazingly persistent meme of the overly influential image' has been wildly overstated." Recently, Farah and her colleague Cayce Hook described this phenomenon as the “seductive allure of ‘seductive allure’".

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Michael, R., Newman, E., Vuorre, M., Cumming, G., and Garry, M. (2013). On the (non)persuasive power of a brain image. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0391-6

--Further reading--
The power of blobs on the brain
Are Brain Scans Really So Persuasive?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. The great illusion of the self - mind-boggling goodness from New Scientist (free registration required to read the full articles).

2. Professor Uta Frith DBE, autism expert and a"grand dame of British science", was on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on Sunday - you can listen again on iPlayer or download the podcast.

3. In the wake of recent scandals in social psychology, Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone have written a lengthy defence of the discipline in the latest issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement. To help prevent future fraud, they note at the end that a consensus has been reached: "that psychology journals will now require the raw data for all published studies to be publicly accessible online". If true, this is a promising development, but it's the first I've heard of it. (In related news, a new psychology journal BMC Psychology has launched, promising to avoid bias towards flashy, counter-intuitive results).

4. The latest (March) issue of The Psychologist magazine is online and includes open-access articles on involuntary autobiographical memory and the globalisation of mental illness. There's a free digital preview over at Issuu.

5. I reported last week on Obama's mission to map the human brain. Some more reactions are in ... Chris Frith said on Twitter that this from Steve Fleming is the best reaction he's read. Vaughan Bell also provided his take over at Mind Hacks: "while the big sell is nonsense, the project is likely to genuinely revolutionise neuroscience in a way that could push the field light years ahead."

6. How what you think of your boss - especially whether you trust them - influences their ability to lift your performance. New research digested by Alex Fradera at our sister blog.

7. I shared a link two weeks ago about a new report from the RSA based on psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary, which explores human politics and philosophy in the context of the contrasting functional styles of the left and right brain hemispheres. Kenan Malik has provided an excellent critique of the new RSA report (and the book it's based on). McGilchrist took the criticism very badly - check out the full exchange on Malik's blog. (There's also a useful overview of the debate from Jonathan Rowson over at the RSA's Social Brain blog).

8. A new study has looked at Twitter habits associated with having more followers - Neurobonkers has the low down.

9. The Pacific Standard published an article by Ethan Watters about the researchers who are exposing psychology's bias towards WEIRD people.

10. "Happiness = marriage + money ($50-75K) + no kids, says Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert". That's according to a report by Chuck Leddy for the Harvard Gazette.

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And looking ahead, if you can make it to London this weekend - check out these brain-related events taking place at the Barbican as part of the Wonder (art and brain) programme of events. .
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Why are older people less prone to mind wandering?

Invite a group of older participants to a psychology laboratory to engage in computer-based mental tasks, and you'll find that their minds wander less often than the minds of young adults. This has been established many times by studies that interrupt participants mid-task to ask them what they're thinking about.

At first, the finding appears to be a conundrum. Older adults typically perform worse on cognitive tasks than younger people, and ageing is usually thought to have an adverse effect on concentration. So, if anything, you'd think mind wandering would increase with age.

In fact, the age-related decrease in mind wandering is consistent with an influential theory. This states that we mind wander off a primary task when we have mental capacity to spare, such as when that task is easy or well-practised. By this account, it makes sense that older adults mind wander less because they have fewer attentional resources to spare.

However, not all experts accept this resource-based theory. Jennifer McVay and her colleagues propose an opposite account of mind wandering. They think we mind wander when we lose attentional control and our focus turns away from the task toward other issues of concern. They point to research showing that the performance of young and old is harmed equally by mind wandering, a fact that doesn't make sense in terms of mind wandering only occurring when the mind has spare capacity.

In a new study, McVay and her colleagues tested the idea that past research has underestimated how often older adults mind wander. They think this mind wandering tends to be toward performance-related concerns that previous research has probably miscategorised as on-task focus. Older adults are more anxious about doing well, McVay says, and so a lot of their mid-task thoughts are about their performance, which is not the same as being focused on the actual task.

An initial study involved 108 young adults (aged 18-28) and 99 older adults (aged 60 to 75) completing two computer tasks. One was a test of inhibitory control; the other a test of sustained vigilance. During these tasks, the participants were periodically prompted to say what they were thinking about. McVay's crucial innovation was to present participants with a response category that related to performance concerns, alongside the categories of completely off-topic thoughts or pure task focus.

As predicted, the older adults reported more thoughts that were about task-related concerns (thoughts that may have been mis-categorised by earlier research as task focus). But even taking these extra performance-related thoughts into account, the older adults still mind wandered far less often than the younger adults (31 per cent vs. 48 per cent). Or, put differently, the older adults still spent more time focused on the actual tasks.

A second study with a new batch of older and younger participants was similar but this time the task was harder - requiring participants to report whenever the current item in a stream of digits or letters was the same as one that occurred one or two positions previously. The results were similar - older adults reported more task-related concerns for the harder version of this task, but altogether they again actually had fewer moments of lost focus compared with younger participants.

As in previous research, instances of mind wandering were equally harmful to the performance of young and old participants, which McVay's team reiterated was inconsistent with the idea that mind wandering occurs when spare capacity is available. The fact that older adults found the mental capacity to dwell on performance-related concerns more than young people also seems to count against the reserve capacity explanation for why they mind wander less.

So where does this leave us? McVay's group stand by their theory that mind wandering reflects a loss of attentional focus combined with a shift of attention to other concerns. These non-task concerns vary in their salience depending on the context. McVay's team believe that in a laboratory environment older adults are less distracted by off-task concerns, such as their relationships and well-being, and that's why they mind wander less in these kinds of experiments:

"the college campus setting," they explained, "with bustling hallways, high-tech computer workstations, and young student experimenters, is more likely related to the goals and current concerns of the undergraduate population, and so the typical context for aging studies is less likely to trigger current-concern-related TUTs [task unrelated thoughts] in older subjects."

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  McVay, J., Meier, M., Touron, D., and Kane, M. (2013). Aging ebbs the flow of thought: Adult age differences in mind wandering, executive control, and self-evaluation Acta Psychologica, 142 (1), 136-147 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.11.006

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Psychology of Crime (Journal of Criminal Justice).

Mental Health and Challenging Behaviour (Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities).

How Does the Brain Process Time? (Neuropsychologia).

Developmental Delay (Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews).

The Costs and Benefits of Finding Meaning in the Past (Memory).

Atypical Development (Journal of Child Language).

Parenting for an Early Head Start (Parenting Science and Practice).

Social Dilemmas (Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes).

Special Section on Genomics (Child Development).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.