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Both academic and legal communities have cautioned that laypersons may be unduly persuaded by images of the brain and may fail to interpret them appropriately. While early studies confirmed this concern, a second wave of research was repeatedly unable to find evidence of such a bias. The newest wave of studies paints a more nuanced picture in which, under certain circumstances, a neuroimage bias reemerges. To help make sense of this discordant body of research, we highlight the contextual significance of understanding how laypersons' decision making is or is not impacted by neuroimages, provide an overview of findings from all sides of the neuroimage bias question, and discuss what these findings mean to public use and understanding of neuroimages.

Several highly-cited experiments have presented evidence suggesting that neuroimages may unduly bias laypeople’s judgments of scientific research. This finding has been especially worrisome to the legal community in which neuroimage techniques may be used to produce evidence of a person’s mental state. However, a more recent body of work that has looked directly at the independent impact of neuroimages on layperson decision-making (both in legal and more general arenas), and has failed to find evidence of bias. To help resolve these conflicting findings, this research uses eye tracking technology to provide a measure of attention to different visual representations of neuroscientific data. Finding an effect of neuroimages on the distribution of attention would provide a potential mechanism for the influence of neuroimages on higher-level decisions. In the present experiment, a sample of laypeople viewed a vignette that briefly described a court case in which the defendant’s actions might have been explained by a neurological defect. Accompanying these vignettes was either an MRI image of the defendant’s brain, or a bar graph depicting levels of brain activity–two competing visualizations that have been the focus of much of the previous research on the neuroimage bias. We found that, while laypeople differentially attended to neuroimagery relative to the bar graph, this did not translate into differential judgments in a way that would support the idea of a neuroimage bias.

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Video mediated communication (VMC) tools such as Zoom are rapidly being adopted in distance education, telehealth, and for job-related purposes like meetings and interviews.However, how interactions may differ between VMC and face-to-face (FTF) communicationis not yet fully understood. In particular, much of the existing literature has explicitly focused on how VMC affects interdependent communication exchange (active) rather than mere observation (passive), and what research does exist on passive observation has focused on recorded (asynchronous) VMC rather than live (synchronous) interactions. Using a mock interview paradigm, we directly compared differences in perceptions of a job applicant between ostensibly synchronous VMC passive and FTF passive participants. VMC passive participants rated the job applicant as less likeable, less hirable, and as having less agency than did FTF passive participants. These large effects (> 1 SD) were partially mediated by lower self-reported attention for VMC participants. These results are discussed in terms of their basic and applied implications for VMC and perceptions of others.