The research carried out as part of this project is aimed at finding out what is the adaptive function of risk, and in particular whether it can be reduced to unacquaintance with the environment and security or stability. It is hypothesized that the influence of these factors is mediated by exploration and the shape of the subjective utility function, respectively. Research focuses on the difference between adolescents and young adults, as groups that differ both in terms of risk and in terms of the both key factors.
A project concerning an important topic of the psychological basis of irrational beliefs in paranormal, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Why some people remain sceptical while some fall prey to them? In particular, we examine the relationship between irrational beliefs and religious beliefs, reasoning ability and thinking styles (closed-mindedness, intuitive thinking). In recent years we collected the relevant data from more than 1000 people, based on which we are currently preparing a publication.
One aspect of creative cognition that can be investigated experimentally is finding insightful solutions to ill-described problems. For example, cut the hole in the paying card so you can go through it! For years, insight problem solving have been treated as unrelated or even contrasting with analytical thinking. We demonstrated that both are very strongly correlated positively, suggesting that effective insight depends on WM and fluid intelligence. Moreover, we put into question claims that physical interaction facilitates insight – for most insight problems it does not matter if they are solved physically or using paper and pencil. We also studied subjective experience accompanying insight – its best marker seems to be suddenness. Feeling of insight seems to result from fluency of cognitive processing, even in well-described problems.
Analogy making, that is, establishing relational mapping between two situations that allows transfer of information from one stituation to the other, helps us in inferring new information about the world. Our group studies how such a mapping develops. One finding is that it strongly loads on WM, especially when the time is limited. Eye tracking revealed precise time course of mapping. Selecting candidate analogues is prone to distraction, that is, objects or situations associated semantically and similar perceptually can be incorrectly selected even if they are unrelated relationally. We also found that schizophrenia patients are especially prone to such distraction (generally, patients’ reasoning abilities are hugely disintegrated).
Visual short-term (or working) memory (WM) actively maintains information crucial for the task at hand. However, how that information is represented is not fully understood. Our experiments indicated that visual objects in WM are stored using a hierarchical representation, which contains not only single objects but also the relations among them and the accompanying context.
Cognitive psychology proposes that successful conflict resolution requires an adjustment of cognitive control, which allows us to activate goal, while inhibiting conflicting information. So how does our mind act when different sources of conflict co-occur? The aim of the project is to investigate how cognitive-control processes induced by one conflict source (e.g. ignoring radio while driving a car) coexist with control processes induced by another source conflict (e.g. car braking when a wild animal is crossing the road). The project consists of a series of experiments in which the behavioral measurement is accompanied by the measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs). The experiments should allow for a precise examination of the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in coping with many conflicts at the same time. The project is financed by the National Science Center.
People vary in relational reasoning in abstract problems (ability called fluid intelligence; Gf). For almost 20 years, we have been tracking the neural and cognitive mechanisms that could contribute to this ability (research currently supported by the OPUS grant from National Science Centre). We found out that, at the neural level, an important feature of the intelligent brain is proper synchronization of oscillatory activity, especially precise coupling of fast oscillations to certain phase of slower wave. At the cognitive level, our results suggest that how well people bind together two pieces of simple information (e.g., represent two symbols in the proper order) almost fully explains the variance in Gf, suggesting that reliable binding of information is critical for it. In consequence, even verifying validity of given relations is an excellent marker of Gf, with no need to measure via more complex relation discovery and application.
The last 15 years of research on brain mechanisms of perception suggest that efficient attention and resulting sensorimotor discrimination depend on synchronization of various neural processes in time (via within-frequency coherence and cross-frequency coupling, CFC). Using covariance structure modeling on sensorimotor discrimination abilities, eye tracking, CFC and conectome analyses using EEG data, as well as trying to impact discrimination via transcranial electric stimulation (tACS), we struggle to understand the structure, function, and mechanism of attention and discrimination (the SONATA BIS grant sponsored by National Science Centre). The main results so far include the model posting two correlated, yet statistically distinguishable, sensorimotor discrimination factors: the visual and the auditory-temporal.
This research examines how people discover and learn relations, for example those governing problems to be solved or defining categories (so-called relational categories such as predator, justice etc.). One important result is that learning relations and relational categories needs time, that is, under time pressure people either rely on perceptual similarity and semantic associations or develop incomplete relations.