Hang Zhang

People are known for good predictions in domains they have rich experience with, such as everyday statistics and intuitive physics. But how well can they predict for problems they lack experience with, such as the duration of an ongoing epidemic caused by a new virus? Amid the first wave of COVID-19 in China, we conducted an online diary study, asking each of over 400 participants to predict the remaining duration of the epidemic, once per day for 14 days. Participants’ predictions reflected a reasonable use of publicly available information but were meanwhile biased, subject to the influence of negative affect and future time perspectives. Computational modeling revealed that participants neither relied on prior distributions of epidemic durations as in inferring everyday statistics, nor on mechanistic simulations of epidemic dynamics as in computing intuitive physics. Instead, with minimal experience, participants’ predictions were best explained by similarity-based generalization of the temporal pattern of epidemic statistics. In two control experiments, we further confirmed that such cognitive algorithm is not specific to the epidemic scenario and that minimal and rich experience do lead to different prediction behaviors for the same observations. We conclude that people generalize patterns in recent history to predict the future under minimal experience.

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: beliefs for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns.

To help College Students improve their entrepreneurial psychology and enrich their innovative achievements, this paper investigates College Students’ entrepreneurial behavior based on the theory of positive psychology under the background of multiculturalism. Firstly, the background and development status of multiculturalism are expounded, and the main features of the multicultural era are pointed out; Secondly, the current situation is explained for College Students’ mental health and entrepreneurial behavior, and the specific connotation of College Students’ entrepreneurial psychology is summarized according to entrepreneurial behavior, including entrepreneurial consciousness, entrepreneurial will, entrepreneurial capability, and entrepreneurial personality; Thirdly, the positive effects of inspirational films and roles on the psychology of College Students are discussed. From the connotation of film and television culture, the main features of films are reviewed: intuitiveness, immediacy, universality, entertainment, and orientation. Finally, according to the psychological impact of inspirational films on College Students, a Questionnaire Survey is designed and distributed among the local College Students, and assumptions are put forward. The results show that the differences of College Students’ entrepreneurial level are mainly reflected in gender, urban, and rural household registration, only-child-or-no, and entrepreneurial experience, and the gender differences are mainly in entrepreneurial consciousness, will, and personality ; There are significant differences in consciousness, will, capability, and personality between urban and rural household registration and entrepreneurial experience ; The differences between the only-child and non-only-child are obvious in three aspects: will, capability, and personality. After the intervention of inspirational films, the average scores of all dimensions of the entrepreneurial level of students in the intervention group are 35.45, 36.41, 38.17, and 37.22, respectively, which have a certain improvement compared with the situation before the intervention. There are significant differences in the four dimensions, which is statistically significant, indicating that the intervention of inspirational films has a positive impact on students’ entrepreneurial level.

Previous studies have found that P1 and P2 components were more sensitive to configural and featural face processing, respectively, when attentional resources were sufficient, suggesting that face processing follows a coarse-to-fine sequence. However, the role of working memory load in the time course of configural and featural face processing is poorly understood, especially whether it differs during encoding and retrieval stages. This study employed a delayed recognition task with varying WM load and face spatial frequency. Our behavioral and ERP results showed that WM load modulated face SF processing. Specifically, for the encoding stage, P1 and P2 were more sensitive to broadband SF faces, while N170 was more sensitive to low SF and BSF faces. For the retrieval stage, P1 on the right hemisphere was more sensitive to BSF faces relative to HSF faces, N170 was more sensitive to LSF faces than HSF faces, especially under the load 1 condition, while P2 was more sensitive to high SF faces than HSF faces, especially under load 3 condition. These results indicate that faces are perceived less finely during the encoding stage, whereas face perception follows a coarse-to-fine sequence during the retrieval stage, which is influenced by WM load. The coarse and fine information were processed especially under the low and high load conditions, respectively.