Department of Psychology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 152 Freylinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854-8020, USA.
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2023 Jan;55(1):220-235. doi: 10.3758/s13428-022-01826-3. Epub 2022 Mar 30.
We introduce the first set of stimuli designed to resolve methodological and theoretical issues that have muddled the interpretation of results on the memorability of supernatural concepts (e.g., ghosts, souls, spirits), an important line of research in the cognitive science of religion (Barrett, 2007). We focus here on Boyer's (1994), Boyer, 2001) pioneering minimally counterintuitive (MCI) hypothesis according to which supernatural concepts tap a special memory-enhancing mechanism linked to violations of default intuitive inferences. Empirical tests of the MCI account have given rise to a vexed picture that renders meaningful interpretation difficult. The lack of a common standard of comparison among different studies, coupled with the presence of uncontrolled variables independently known to affect memorability, lie at the heart of these problems. We show that our new stimuli offer the hope of resolving these issues, thereby establishing a more secure foundation for the study of the memorability of supernatural concepts.
我们介绍了第一组旨在解决方法学和理论问题的刺激材料，这些问题混淆了对超自然概念（例如鬼魂、灵魂、精神）可记忆性的研究结果的解释，这是宗教认知科学的一个重要研究方向（Barrett，2007）。我们在这里重点关注 Boyer（1994）、Boyer（2001）的开创性的最小违背直觉假设（MCI），根据该假设，超自然概念利用了一种特殊的增强记忆的机制，与违反默认直觉推断有关。对 MCI 假设的实证检验产生了一个令人困惑的情况，使得有意义的解释变得困难。缺乏不同研究之间共同的比较标准，再加上独立已知会影响可记性的不可控变量的存在，是这些问题的核心。我们表明，我们的新刺激物提供了解决这些问题的希望，从而为超自然概念的可记性研究奠定了更坚实的基础。
