The propensity to experience meaningful patterns in random arrangements and unrelated events shows considerable interindividual differences. Reduced inhibitory control (over sensory processes) and decreased working memory capacities are associated with this trait, which implies that the activation of frontal as well as posterior brain regions may be altered during rest and working memory tasks. In addition, people experiencing more meaningful coincidences showed reduced gray matter of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is linked to the inhibition of irrelevant information in working memory and the control and integration of multisensory information. To study deviations in the functional connectivity of the IFG with posterior associative areas, the present study investigated the fMRI resting state in a large sample of n = 101 participants. We applied seed-to-voxel analysis and found that people who perceive more meaningful coincidences showed negative functional connectivity of the left IFG (i.e. pars triangularis) with areas of the left posterior associative cortex (e.g. superior parietal cortex). A data-driven multivoxel pattern analysis further indicated that functional connectivity of a cluster located in the right cerebellum with a cluster including parts of the left middle frontal gyrus, left precentral gyrus, and the left IFG (pars opercularis) was associated with meaningful coincidences. These findings add evidence to the neurocognitive foundations of the propensity to experience meaningful coincidences, which strengthens the idea that deviations of working memory functions and inhibition of sensory and motor information explain why people experience more meaning in meaningless noise.

The perception of meaningful patterns in random arrangements and unrelated events takes place in our everyday lives, coined apophenia, synchronicity, or the experience of meaningful coincidences. However, we do not know yet what predicts this phenomenon. To investigate this, we re-analyzed a combined data set of two daily diary studies with a total of N = 169 participants (mean age 29.95 years; 54 men). We investigated if positive or negative affect (PA, NA) predicts the number of meaningful coincidences on the following day (or vice versa). By means of a cross-lagged multilevel modelling approach (Bayesian estimation) we evaluated with which of two theoretical assumptions the data are more in line. First, if meaningful coincidences are facilitated by a broader and more flexible thinking style, PA should positively predict meaningful coincidences at the following day. However, if the experience of meaningful coincidences signifies a strategy to cope with negative feeling states, NA should predict the experience of meaningful coincidences during the following day. In favour of a more flexible thinking style, we found that PA predicted the number of perceived coincidences the following day. We did not find any effect for NA, and therefore, no evidence arguing for the coping mechanism hypothesis of meaningful coincidences.

Human beings are predisposed to identifying false patterns in statistical noise, a likely survival advantage during our evolutionary development. Moreover, humans seem to prefer \"positive\" results over \"negative\" ones. These two cognitive features lay a framework for premature adoption of falsely positive studies. Added to this predisposition is the tendency of journals to \"overbid\" for exciting or newsworthy manuscripts, incentives in both the academic and publishing industries that value change over truth and scientific rigour, and a growing dependence on complex statistical techniques that some reviewers do not understand. The purpose of this article is to describe the underlying causes of premature adoption and provide recommendations that may improve the quality of published science.
RéSUMé: Les êtres humains ont tendance à identifier de fausses corrélations dans le bruit de fond statistique, ce qui nous a probablement conféré un avantage en matière de survie au cours de notre développement évolutionnaire. De plus, l’être humain semble préférer les résultats « positifs » aux résultats « négatifs ». Ces deux caractéristiques cognitives posent un cadre expliquant l’adoption hâtive d’études faussement positives. À cette prédisposition s’ajoutent la tendance des revues à « surenchérir » pour les manuscrits prometteurs ou notables, les incitatifs tant dans les milieux académiques qu’éditoriaux, qui préfèrent le changement à la vérité et à la rigueur scientifique, et une dépendance croissante à l’égard de techniques statistiques complexes que certains réviseurs ne comprennent pas. L’objectif de cet article est de décrire les causes sous-jacentes d’adoption prématurée de nouveautés et de proposer des recommandations afin d’améliorer la qualité de la science publiée.

Over a series of decisions between two or more probabilistically rewarded options, humans have a tendency to diversify their choices, even when this will lead to diminished overall reward. In the extreme case of probability matching, this tendency is expressed through allocation of choices in proportion to their likelihood of reward. Research suggests that this behaviour is an instinctive response, driven by heuristics, and that it may be overruled through the application of sufficient deliberation and self-control. However, if this is the case, then how and why did this response become established? The present study explores the hypothesis that diversification of choices, and potentially probability matching, represents an overextension of a historically normative foraging strategy. This is done through examining choice behaviour on a simple simulated foraging task, designed to model the natural process of accumulation of unharvested resources over time. Behaviour was then directly compared with that observed on a standard fixed probability task (cf. Ellerby & Tunney, 2017). Results indicated a convergence of choice patterns on the simulated foraging task, between participants who acted intuitively and those who took a more strategic approach. These findings are also compared with those of another similarly motivated study (Schulze, van Ravenzwaaij, & Newell, 2017).

We visually perceive meaning from stimuli in the external world. There are inter-individual variations in the perception of meaning. A candidate factor to explain this variation is positive schizotypy, which is a personality analogous to positive symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., visual hallucination). The present study investigated the relationship between positive schizotypy, and the perception of meaning derived from meaningful and meaningless visual stimuli. Positive schizotypy in Japanese female undergraduates (n = 35) was assessed by the Cognitive-Perceptual dimension of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. The participants were asked to report what they saw in noise-degraded images of meaningful objects (Experiment 1) and to respond whether the objects were meaningful (Experiment 2A) and which paired objects were meaningful (Experiment 2B). Positive schizotypy (i.e., Cognitive-Perceptual score) did not correlate with time to detect meaningful objects, and with false-alarm rates, sensitivity, and response criterion in the perception of meaning from meaningful and meaningless stimuli. These results were against our hypothesis and contradicted previous findings. The inconsistencies are discussed in terms of different methods (e.g., stimulus category) and conditions (e.g., paranormal beliefs).

There are ample inter-individual differences in the frequency with which people perceive meaningful coincidences. Previous research has identified increased proactive interference, that is a reduced working memory capacity, as one possible mechanism associated with this phenomenon. The present study aimed at extending this finding into the domain of neuroscience, (1) by assessing EEG alpha oscillations during the retention of information, (2) by replicating the behavioral link between meaningful coincidences and proactive interference. In a sample of 52 participants, the behavioral replication was successful. Furthermore, participants who perceived more meaningful coincidences showed higher alpha power increases at parietal-occipital sites, and at the same time, displayed lower alpha power increases at frontal areas, during retention of information. This neurophysiological activation pattern further underlines the assumption that participants who perceive more meaningful coincidences show lower working memory capacities, since increased alpha power at parietal areas reflects a higher load on working memory demands.

Nurses routinely engage in pattern recognition and interpretation in qualitative research and clinical practice. However, they risk spontaneously perceiving patterns among things that are not meaningfully related. Although all people are prone to this cognitive bias of \"apophenia\", nurses may be at increased risk because they commonly produce or at least use qualitative research that can be highly interpretive. Qualitative researchers have been silent on the risk of apophenia and hence on exploring how attention to apophenia could help to indicate and manage such unconscious biases. Therefore this conceptual paper suggests how, in disciplines like nursing, researchers could attend to and use reflexivity on signs of possible apophenia to help bring unconscious biases to awareness. Within safe communities of professional practice, the researchers could cooperate with trusted peers to reflect on how and why they may each perceive patterned phenomena from different perspectives. If one reason is that the researchers, for example, appear to exhibit particular unconscious biases, then dialogue could help them to become aware of, and reflect on the biases. This expansion of researchers\' consciousness of bias could inform the management of apophenia and enhance the quality of qualitative research and modern nursing practice.

Given a repeated choice between two or more options with independent and identically distributed reward probabilities, overall pay-offs can be maximized by the exclusive selection of the option with the greatest likelihood of reward. The tendency to match response proportions to reward contingencies is suboptimal. Nevertheless, this behaviour is well documented. A number of explanatory accounts have been proposed for probability matching. These include failed pattern matching, driven by apophenia, and a heuristic-driven response that can be overruled with sufficient deliberation. We report two experiments that were designed to test the relative effects on choice behaviour of both an intuitive versus strategic approach to the task and belief that there was a predictable pattern in the reward sequence, through a combination of both direct experimental manipulation and post-experimental self-report. Mediation analysis was used to model the pathways of effects. Neither of two attempted experimental manipulations of apophenia, nor self-reported levels of apophenia, had a significant effect on proportions of maximizing choices. However, the use of strategy over intuition proved a consistent predictor of maximizing, across all experimental conditions. A parallel analysis was conducted to assess the effect of controlling for individual variance in perceptions of reward contingencies. Although this analysis suggested that apophenia did increase probability matching in the standard task preparation, this effect was found to result from an unforeseen relationship between self-reported apophenia and perceived reward probabilities. A Win-Stay Lose-Shift (WSLS ) analysis indicated no reliable relationship between WSLS and either intuition or strategy use.

Perception of objectively independent events or stimuli as being significantly connected and the associated proneness to perceive meaningful patterns constitute part of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, which are associated with altered attentional processes in lateralized speech perception. Since perceiving meaningful patterns is to some extent already prevalent in the general population, the aim of the study was to investigate whether the propensity to experience meaningful patterns in co-occurring events and random stimuli may be associated with similar altered attentional processes in lateralized speech perception. Self-reported and behavioral indicators of the perception of meaningful patterns were assessed in non-clinical individuals, along with EEG auditory evoked potentials during the performance of an attention related lateralized speech perception task (Dichotic Listening Test). A greater propensity to perceive meaningful patterns was associated with higher N1 amplitudes of the evoked potentials to the onset of the dichotically presented consonant-vowel syllables, indicating enhanced automatic attention in early sensory processing. The study suggests that more basic mechanisms in how people associate events may play a greater role in the cognitive biases that are manifest in personality expressions such as positive schizotypy, rather than that positive schizotypy moderates these cognitive biases directly.

Ninety-five participants (32 believers, 30 disbelievers and 33 neutral believers in the paranormal) participated in an experiment comprising one visual and one auditory block of trials. Each block included one ESP, two degraded stimuli and one random trial. Each trial included 8 screens or epochs of \"random\" noise. Participants entered a guess if they perceived a stimulus or changed their mind about stimulus identity, rated guesses for confidence and made notes during each trial. Believers and disbelievers did not differ in the number of guesses made, or in their ability to detect degraded stimuli. Believers displayed a trend toward making faster guesses for some conditions and significantly higher confidence and more misidentifications concerning guesses than disbelievers. Guesses, misidentifications and faster response latencies were generally more likely in the visual than auditory conditions. ESP performance was no different from chance. ESP performance did not differ between belief groups or sensory modalities.