International Journal of Cognitive Sciences

This study discusses the asymmetric dominance effect in the context of political elections with third-party candidates. Animal and human research both show that the addition or removal of a third option influences choices between the remaining two options. The direction of sway created by the addition/removal of the 3rd option is context-dependent and unconsciously regulated. The results confirmed our hypotheses that both the timing and perceived viability of third-party candidates significantly influence voter preferences, with the strongest effects observed when third-party candidates remain present through election day. These findings suggest that the impact of third-party candidates extends beyond simple vote-splitting and is at least partly unconscious, though direct implicit measures were not employed. This study is situated in the context of U.S. presidential elections and focuses on moderate voters.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive form of brain stimulation that involves passing a weak electrical current between electrodes on the scalp to modulate underlying neural tissue. TDCS has been shown to modulate cognition in a variety of domains, including memory, attention, and visual processing. Prior work from our laboratory has shown positive effects of tDCS on learning to detect target objects hidden in complex naturalistic visual scenes and learn rules for categorizing images, though the mechanism for these benefits remains unknown. One possibility is that tDCS optimizes visual search by modulating visual attention or via the reduction in search errors. One method of quantifying visual attention is to use eye tracking to record search patterns to determine if and how visual search is adjusted under verum stimulation conditions. Eye tracking data allows classification of errors into error types, including sampling errors (failing to look in the relevant region), recognition errors (looking at the critical portion of a scene, but failing to recognize it as such as evidenced by visual fixation), and decision-making errors (fixating on the relevant portion of a scene, but making the wrong determination). Our results indicate that the benefit tDCS confers on visual search for targets stems from the reduction in decision-making errors when targets are present (Cohen’s d = 0.86). Also reported is a replication of previous findings showing a tDCS-dependent improvement in learning this task, learning score (Cohen’s d = 0.88); d’ (Cohen’s d = 1.00). This provides support for moving tDCS into the application space by pairing it with analysts who are concerned with the type of search error that is corrected via stimulation.

The twenty-first century has witnessed an unprecedented surge in high-quality research devoted to the understanding of cognition [...]