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on Neuroeconomics |
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Issue of 2024‒03‒18
three papers chosen by |
| By: | Dickinson, David L. (Appalachian State University); Drummond, Sean P.A. (Monash University) |
| Abstract: | Story telling is part of life, and the retelling of stories is an important form of communication, cultural practice, and message transmission. Insufficient sleep is known to affect relevant cognitive skill areas necessary for story retelling or transmission fidelity. We conducted a preregistered study on n=118 young adults who were administered a week each of restricted and well-rested sleep levels in their home environment (37 additional control participants were well-rested both treatment weeks). A serial story reproduction task was administered online, and the content of story retells was examined regarding the preservation of characters, details, and the key story event. Chains of up to 3 retells of a given story were examined, which involved varied numbers of sleep restricted (SR) versus well-rested (WR) retellers. While all retells of a story showed an average decay in content, results show that additional SR retellers in a chain was associated with greater decay, which mostly resulted from the introduction of an initial SR reteller at the beginning of the chain. Supporting the group-level effect, individual-level analysis confirmed that both the number of details and the story's key event were significantly less preserved after the SR compared to WR treatment week. Exploratory analysis showed an attenuation of this effect in those who reported a higher level of affective response (interest or surprise) in the story. This suggests that emotional engagement is important in combatting the deleterious effects of SR on successful story retelling, and perhaps on other types of content recollection. |
| Keywords: | sleep restriction, cognition, communication, information transmission |
| JEL: | C91 D90 D83 |
| Date: | 2024–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16797&r=neu |
| By: | J. Aislinn Bohren; Josh Hascher; Alex Imas; Michael Ungeheuer; Martin Weber |
| Abstract: | We propose a framework where perceptions of uncertainty are driven by the interaction between cognitive constraints and the way that people learn about it—whether information is presented sequentially or simultaneously. People can learn about uncertainty by observing the distribution of outcomes all at once (e.g., seeing a stock return distribution) or sampling outcomes from the relevant distribution sequentially (e.g., experiencing a series of stock returns). Limited attention leads to the overweighting of unlikely but salient events—the dominant force when learning from simultaneous information—whereas imperfect recall leads to the underweighting of such events—the dominant force when learning sequentially. A series of studies show that, when learning from simultaneous information, people are overoptimistic about and are attracted to assets that mostly underperform, but sporadically exhibit large outperformance. However, they overwhelmingly select more consistently outperforming assets when learning the same information sequentially, and this is reflected in beliefs. The entire 40-percentage point preference reversal appears to be driven by limited attention and memory; manipulating these factors completely eliminates the effect of the learning environment on choices and beliefs, and can even reverse it. |
| JEL: | D01 D03 D9 D91 G40 |
| Date: | 2024–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32149&r=neu |
| By: | Ankur Betageri |
| Abstract: | I propose that quality of life can be compared despite the difference in values across cultures when it is experienced at the sensory and perceptual level. I argue that an approach to assessing quality of life which focuses on an individual's ability to organize his or her context by perceiving positive constellations of factors in the environment and his or her ability to achieve valuable acts and realize valuable states of being is more meaningful than the approaches of metrics which focus directly, and often solely, on the means of living and the means of freedom. Because the felt experience of quality of life is derived from a constellation of factors which make up the indivisible structure of a milieu, the experience of quality of life cannot be regarded as a subjective experience. Through the example of how different frequencies, and mixtures of frequencies, of light are perceived as colour by the eye, I demonstrate that the human cognitive apparatus, because of its relation to the object that is measured, apprehends different scales of quantity as degrees of quality. I show that lived experience is the result of a selective relationality with one's environment and that the experience of quality has something to do with the perception of entities in their interrelated and networked nature as wholes. |
| Date: | 2022–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2210.03639&r=neu |