Markus Huff

Markus Huff
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Markus verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Markus verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien | KMRC

Professor

About

176
Publications
42,942
Reads
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1,613
Citations
Introduction
Information in real life is highly dynamic. In movies, road traffic, sports, and multimedia learning environments humans have to select relevant information for subsequent processing. The research in our lab focuses on how the human mind processes such dynamic information. We study processes of visual attention, working memory, and long-term memory representations.
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - present
Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien
Position
  • Professor (Full)
October 2017 - December 2019
German Institute for Adult Education
Position
  • Head of Department
January 2007 - September 2010
Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
October 2010 - January 2014
University of Tübingen
Field of study
  • Psychology
October 2000 - December 2003
University of Tübingen
Field of study
  • Computer Science
October 1998 - December 2003
University of Tübingen
Field of study
  • Psychology (Dipl.-Psych.)

Publications

Publications (176)
Article
Full-text available
Humans often falsely report having seen a causal link between two dynamic scenes if the second scene depicts a valid logical consequence of the initial scene. As an example, a video clip shows someone kicking a ball including the ball flying. Even if the video clip omitted the moment of contact (i.e., the causal link), participants falsely report h...
Article
Full-text available
Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between 2 events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model. Increased encoding effort finally leads to a memory benefit at event boundari...
Article
Full-text available
Visual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging-event information (i.e., pictures, text) affects the understandi...
Article
Full-text available
With the recent surge in digitalization across all levels of education, online video platforms gained educational relevance. Therefore, optimizing such platforms in line with learners' actual needs should be considered a priority for scientists and educators alike. In this project, we triangulate logfiles of a large German online video platform for...
Article
Full-text available
The concept of presence describes participants’ feelings of “being there” – in a mediated setting such as a virtual environment or a Hollywood movie. Consistently, it has been reported that higher levels of immersion (i.e. providing richer information) are related to higher presence levels. Immersion and presence are measured, asking participants t...
Article
Full-text available
Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns w...
Article
Full-text available
Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus acros...
Article
Full-text available
The present preregistered study tested whether perceived suspense in horror films is responsible for the feeling of time flying. Because suspense, the feeling of excitement, narrows the attentional focus and time perception also relies on attentional processes, suspenseful film watching might eventually influence the perception of time. We investig...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies have reported algorithm aversion, reflected in harsher judgments about computers that commit errors, compared to humans who commit the same errors. Two online studies ( N = 67, N = 252) tested whether similar effects can be obtained with a referential communication task. Participants were tasked with identifying Japanese kanji chara...
Preprint
Knowing what someone else knows is important in shared environments. However, the knowledge of others is not immediately perceptible. Luckily, an agent’s behavior within a task leaves clues for an observer to estimate their expertise. A task expert will make the best decisions to reach their goal, while a novice will make decisions seemingly at ran...
Preprint
Intellectual humility is increasingly recognized as an epistemic virtue that helps foster truth-seeking, encourage compromise, and mitigate polarization. Yet, the current body of evidence grapples with a striking contradiction: The prevailing theoretical account suggests that intellectual humility hinges on metacognitive ability—the capacity to int...
Article
Full-text available
While watching someone kicking a ball, missing moments of ball contact can be incorrectly identified as seen if the event is continued in a causal manner (i.e., the ball flying off). Does event completion also occur for events of a larger scale such as having breakfast (macro-event), which consists of multiple sub-steps like toasting bread (micro-e...
Preprint
Navigating what is true and what is not is increasingly challenging in today’s world of fake news and alternative facts. Misinformation can spread rapidly, often unintentionally, leading people to believe inaccurate information. Our research investigated how two competing causal information encountered at different times during an event description...
Preprint
Full-text available
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive alignment with human cognitive processes, raising questions about the extent of their similarity to human cognition. This study investigates whether LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, possess metacognitive monitoring abilities akin to humans-particularly in predicting memory performance on an item-by-item...
Preprint
Visual narrative comprehension is essential for navigating modern society, where information, rules, and news are frequently communicated through images, diagrams, and visual stories. Encoding a coherent narrative from disparate elements is critical for all age groups. Although recent data indicate that stress levels have risen compared to previous...
Article
Full-text available
Zusammenfassung: Generative KI (Künstliche Intelligenz) hat mit der Veröffentlichung von Transformer-Modellen wie GPT enorme Entwicklungssprünge vollzogen. Dieses Positionspapier identifiziert zwei Kerneigenschaften generativer KI: die Breite der Einsatzfelder sowie die Fähigkeit, menschenähnlichen Output zu kreieren. Darauf aufbauend diskutiert di...
Preprint
Full-text available
With the increasing integration of robots into various facets of human life, understanding prosociality towards robots emerges as a crucial research endeavour. Across two studies (N = 117 and N = 310), we adopt a third-person perspective to investigate different outcomes of the Dictator Game paradigm. Participants were tasked with evaluating the sh...
Article
Full-text available
Mental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of objects in space. Shepard and Metzler’s shape-matching tasks, frequently used to test mental rotation, involve presenting pictorial representations of 3D objects. This stimulus material has raised questions regarding the ecological validity of the test for mental rotation with actua...
Preprint
Full-text available
We explored the addition bias, a cognitive tendency to prefer adding elements over removing them to alter an initial state or structure, by conducting four preregistered experiments examining the problem-solving behavior of both humans and OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model. The experiments involved 588 participants from the U.S. and 680 iteration...
Preprint
Full-text available
Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrating remarkable capabilities across various tasks despite lacking a foundation in human cognition. This raises the question: can these models, beyond simply mimicking human language patterns, offer insights into the mechanisms underlying human cognition? This study explores the ability of ChatGPT to predict...
Article
Full-text available
The existence of transfer effects of video games on cognitive performance are controversially discussed in experimental psychology. Whereas recent meta-analyses suggest the absence of far transfer effects, empirical evidence regarding near transfer effects is more controversial. This conceptual replication investigated the short-term near transfer...
Article
Full-text available
The plot of a narrative is represented in the form of event models in working memory. Because only parts of the plot are actually presented and information is continually changing, comprehenders have to infer a good portion of a narrative and keep their mental representation updated. Research has identified two related processes (e.g., Gernsbacher,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...
Preprint
Human behavior is frequently constrained by the behavior of other agents (increasingly artificial agents like machines and software). In a cooperative setting, each individual needs to understand the partners’ intentions and corresponding actions to plan their actions adequately. Misunderstandings have adverse effects and diminish the efficiency of...
Preprint
Full-text available
Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...
Preprint
Narrative comprehension, which depends on a range of cognitive abilities, is key for being part of society, but there is not much research on this in older people. Even though there have been many studies on how aging changes cognition, we still do not fully understand how aging affects narrative comprehension. Given the rising prevalence of depres...
Article
Full-text available
Background: There are still unanswered questions concerning the optimal design of educational videos, for instance with regard to the visibility of a talking head next to the learning content. Although visible talking heads in educational videos may stimulate deeper processing, they can also distract from the visual learning content. Aims: The curr...
Preprint
The present preregistered study tested whether perceived suspense in horror films is responsible for the feeling of time flying. Because suspense, the feeling of excitement, narrows the attentional focus and time perception also relies on attentional processes, suspenseful film watching might eventually influence the perception of time. We investig...
Preprint
Background: Understanding narratives is essential for societal participation. However, insufficient literacy or age-related cognitive changes can limit narrative comprehension and create participation barriers.Aims: This study investigates the potential of pictorial narratives to convey information beyond text and break down barriers to comprehensi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in medicine, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing fields in which AI is applied. While some AI-based applications are already outperforming experts regarding diagnostic accuracy, patients' trust in AI is still comparatively low. Given the tremendous potential of medical AI applications,...
Article
Full-text available
Metacognition, our ability to reflect on our own beliefs, manifests itself in the confidence we have in these beliefs, and helps us guide our behavior in complex and uncertain environments. Here, we provide empirical tests of the importance of metacognition during the pandemic. Bayesian and frequentist analyses demonstrate that citizens with higher...
Article
Full-text available
Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in s...
Article
Surveys worldwide show that the public perceives artificial intelligence (AI) as a double-edged sword: A risk and an opportunity. However, how this ambiguous perception of AI is related to people’s willingness to use AI-based applications has yet to be investigated. To this end, two online experiments were conducted, including two samples, N = 246...
Article
Full-text available
Although research showed that media consumption during Covid-19 is related to preventive behaviours, we know less about why people turn to quality or alternative media in the first place. We focus on the role of different fears. More specifically, we assumed that fears focusing on health threats were positively associated with the consumption of qu...
Preprint
Full-text available
The global rise of social media has profoundly changed the ways in which citizens search for information; yet there is still uncertainty regarding the extent to which this societal transformation should be a cause for concern. One popular notion holds that the rise of social media in the 2010s contributed to the proliferation of climate skeptic and...
Article
Full-text available
Online phenomena like echo chambers and polarization are believed to be driven by humans’ penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behavior, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behavior...
Preprint
Full-text available
Robots are increasingly present in our society. Their successful integration depends, however, on understanding and fostering pro-social behavior towards robots, in this case, helping. To better understand people’s reported willingness to help robots across different contexts (delivery, medical, service, and security), we conducted two preregistere...
Article
Full-text available
Research-data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational-psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research-data policies. This increased awarene...
Preprint
Having accurate knowledge about climate change has been shown to influence climatechange attitudes and behavior. However, due to an increase in online mediaconsumption, people are also confronted with much misinformation about climatechange. It is thus crucial that people use valid cues to infer whether information is trueor false, when to update t...
Preprint
Full-text available
The issue of anthropogenic climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for society. Thus, the development of efficient strategies to increase the public's awareness of climate change is essential. Previous research has shown that one such strategy, consensus messaging, can correct peoples' misconceptions about their estimation of scientif...
Preprint
Full-text available
Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlies processing in...
Preprint
Consensus messaging aims to increase climate change awareness by communicating the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. According to the gateway belief model, consensus messages improve the estimation of scientific consensus, which then causes subsequent changes in personal attitudes about climate change. Most studies investigating...
Preprint
Full-text available
The concept of presence describes participants’ feelings of “being there” – in a mediated setting such as a virtual environment or a Hollywood movie. Consistently, it has been reported that higher levels of immersion (i.e. providing richer information) are related to higher presence levels. Immersion and presence are measured, asking participants t...
Article
Full-text available
Consensus messaging aims to increase climate change awareness by communicating the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. According to the gateway belief model, consensus messages improve the estimation of scientific consensus, which then causes subsequent changes in personal attitudes about climate change. Most studies investigating...
Article
Full-text available
In this study, we investigated the nature of long-term memory representations for naturalistic audio-visual scenes. Whereas previous research has shown that audio-visual scenes are recognized more accurately than their unimodal counterparts, it remains unclear whether this benefit stems from audio-visually integrated long-term memory representation...
Preprint
Full-text available
Surveys around the world show that the public perceives artificial intelligence (AI) as a double-edged sword: As a risk but also as an opportunity. However, if and how this ambiguous perception of AI relates to people’s willingness to use it has yet to be investigated. Thus, the present research investigated how people’s risk and opportunity percep...
Preprint
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly used in everyday life. Whereas some of them are widely accepted (e.g., automatically compiled playlists), others are highly controversial (e.g., use of AI in the classroom). While public discourse is dominated by perceptions of the risks associated with AI, we take a fundamentally different...
Preprint
Full-text available
Although research showed that media consumption during COVID-19 is related to preventive behaviors, we know less about why people turn to quality or alternative media. We focus on the role of different fears. More specifically, we assumed that fears focusing on health threats were positively associated with the consumption of quality media and nega...
Preprint
Full-text available
A substantial number of citizens in democratic countries believe in a political media dictate, the false assumption that governments decide what mainstream and flagship journalistic outlets may report or not. Two survey studies using national German samples (N= 590 and N = 1067) revealed that more than one third of the adult population believes in...
Article
Full-text available
A substantial literature shows that public polarization over climate change in the U.S. is most pronounced among the science literate. A dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that science literacy amplifies motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret evidence such that it confirms prior beliefs. The present study tests the biasing account...
Preprint
Full-text available
Research data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research data policies. This increased awarene...
Article
Full-text available
Filmmakers have established editing rules that aim to create cinematic continuity across filmic cuts, thereby avoiding viewers’ confusion despite the abrupt changes in perception. In our present project, we investigated the impact of 3D films, as opposed to 2D films, on the salience of filmic cuts. We employed a cut detection task and focused on wi...
Preprint
Full-text available
We investigated whether the confidence in lie detection judgments is a signal for the accuracy of judgments. We argue that previous methods in tackling this question are inadequate as the assessment of judgment accuracy and confidence is confounded with response bias and lie detection performance. We addressed this confidence-accuracy puzzle by app...
Preprint
Full-text available
Filmmakers have established editing rules that aim to create cinematic continuity across filmic cuts, thereby avoiding viewers’ confusion despite the abrupt changes in perception. In our present project, we investigated the impact of 3D films, as opposed to 2D films, on the salience of filmic cuts. We employed a cut detection task and focused on wi...
Preprint
Online phenomena like echo chambers and belief polarisation are believed to be driven by humans’ penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behaviour, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online b...
Preprint
Full-text available
A substantial literature demonstrates public polarization over climate change, particularly among the science literate. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that science literacy amplifies directional motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret evidence such that it confirms desired conclusions. However, the evidence regarding this bi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation--believing false statements to be true--negatively relates to compliance with public health measures. Here, we make the prediction that metacognitive insight into the varying accuracy of own beliefs predicts compliance with recommended health behaviors, above and beyond the accuracy of these beliefs. In a n...
Article
When processing information from multiple documents about a controversial topic, it is important to consider information about the respective documents’ sources. In two experiments, we investigated whether different ways of providing source information affects learners’ use of source information when trying to make sense of a controversy. Experimen...
Preprint
Full-text available
Visual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging event information (i.e. pictures, text) affects the understandin...
Article
Peer review has become the gold standard in scientific publishing as a selection method and a refinement scheme for research reports. However, despite its pervasiveness and conferred importance, relatively little empirical research has been conducted to document its effectiveness. Further, there is evidence that factors other than a submission’s me...
Article
Full-text available
The comprehension of dynamic naturalistic events poses at least two challenges to the cognitive system: filtering relevant information with attention and dealing with information that was missing or missed. With four experiments, we studied the completion of missing information despite full attention. Participants watched short soccer video clips a...
Article
Objective Mental models guide drivers’ expectations about the functioning of a conditionally automated vehicle. We induced different mental models using preliminary system descriptions to explore mental models with an objective, online measurement during conditionally automated driving. Background Human-machine interaction, based mainly on mental...