The COVID-19 outbreak was labeled a global pandemic by the WHO in March of 2020. During that same month, the number of confirmed cases and the death rate grew exponentially in the United States, creating a serious publichealth emergency. Unfortunately, many Americans dismissed the pandemic as a hoax and failed to properly engage in helpful behaviors like social-distancing and increased hand-washing. Here, we examine a dispositionengagement in analytic-thinking-that might predict beliefs that the pandemic is a hoax and failures to change behavior in positive ways during that critical early period in March. Our results indicate that individuals less likely to engage effortful, deliberative, and reflective cognitive processes were more likely to believe the pandemic was a hoax and less likely to have recently engaged in social-distancing and hand-washing in March. We discuss possible implications of these results for understanding and addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Training interventions for older adults are designed to remediate performance on trained tasks and to generalize, or transfer, to untrained tasks. Evidence for transfer is typically based on the trained group showing greater improvement than controls on untrained tasks, or on a correlation between gains in training and in transfer tasks. However, this ignores potential correlational relationships between trained and untrained tasks that exist before training. By accounting for crossed (trained and untrained) and lagged (pre-training and post-training) and cross-lagged relationships between trained and untrained scores in structural equation models, the training-transfer gain relationship can be independently estimated. Transfer is confirmed if only the trained but not control participants' gain correlation is significant. Modeling data from the Improvement in Memory with Plasticity-based Adaptive Cognitive Training (IMPACT) study (Smith et al., 2009), transfer from speeded auditory discrimination and syllable span to list and text memory and to working memory was demonstrated in 487 adults aged 65–93. Evaluation of age, sex, and education on pretest scores and on change did not alter this. The overlap of the training with transfer measures was also investigated to evaluate the hypothesis that performance gains in a non-verbal speeded auditory discrimination task may be associated with gains on fewer tasks than gains in a verbal working memory task. Gains in speeded processing were associated with gains on one list memory measure. Syllable span gains were associated with improvement in difficult list recall, story recall, and working memory factor scores. Findings confirmed that more overlap with task demands was associated with gains to more of the tasks assessed, suggesting that transfer effects are related to task overlap in multimodal training.

Attributional style is hypothesized to be a causative factor in depression vulnerability; however, no studies to date have examined whether manipulation of attributional style influences depressed mood. The purpose of this study was to determine whether computer-based cognitive bias modification (CBM) procedures could modify attributional style and influence stress vulnerability. Participants were provided with multiple training trials that were intended to promote the use of either a positive or a negative attributional style. Compared with individuals in the negative attributional style condition, individuals in the positive attributional style condition showed decreased tendency to make self-deficient causal attributions for poor performance on a difficult anagram test. Furthermore, individuals in the positive attributional style condition reported less depressed mood in response to this academic stressor. These results suggest that attributional style is not invariable and can potentially be modified with CBM approaches.