In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Governments are instituting mobile tracking technologies to perform rapid contact tracing. However, these technologies are only effective if the public is willing to use them, implying that their perceived public health benefits must outweigh personal concerns over privacy and security. The Australian federal government recently launched the ‘COVIDSafe’ app, designed to anonymously register nearby contacts. If a contact later identifies as infected with COVID-19, health department officials can rapidly followup with their registered contacts to stop the virus’ spread. The current study assessed attitudes towards three tracking technologies (telecommunication network tracking, a government app, and Apple and Google’s Bluetooth exposure notification system) in two representative samples of the Australian public prior to the launch of COVIDSafe. We compared these attitudes to usage of the COVIDSafe app after its launch in a further two representative samples of the Australian public. Using Bayesian methods, we find widespread acceptance for all tracking technologies, however, observe a large intention-behaviour gap between people’s stated attitudes and actual uptake of the COVIDSafe app. We consider the policy implications of these results for Australia and the world at large.

Taiwan has been successful in controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, without a vaccine the threat of a second outbreak remains. Young adults who show few to no symptoms when infected have been identified in many countries as driving the virus’ spread through unidentifiable community transmission. Mobile tracking technologies register nearby contacts of a user and notifies them if one later tests positive to the virus, potentially solving this issue; however, the effectiveness of these technologies depends on their acceptance by the public. The current study assessed attitudes towards three tracking technologies (telecommunication network tracking, a government app, and Apple and Google’s Bluetooth exposure notification system) among four samples of young Taiwanese adults (aged 25 years or younger). Using Bayesian methods, we find high acceptance for all three tracking technologies (>75%), with acceptance for each technology surpassing 90% if additional privacy measures were included. We consider the policy implications of these results for Taiwan and similar cultures.

Pervasive internet and sensor technologies promise to revolutionize psychological science. However, the data collected using these technologies are often v

Cognitive control is required in situations that involve uncertainty or change, such as when resolving conflict, selecting responses and switching tasks. Recently, it has been suggested that cognitive control can be conceptualised as a mechanism which prioritises goal-relevant information to deal with uncertainty. This hypothesis has been supported using a paradigm that requires conflict resolution. In this study, we examine whether cognitive control during task switching is also consistent with this notion. We used information theory to quantify the level of uncertainty in different trial types during a cued task-switching paradigm. We test the hypothesis that differences in uncertainty between task repeat and task switch trials can account for typical behavioural effects in task-switching. Increasing uncertainty was associated with less efficient performance (i.e., slower and less accurate), particularly on switch trials and trials that afford little opportunity for advance preparation. Interestingly, both mixing and switch costs were associated with a common episodic control process. These results support the notion that cognitive control may be conceptualised as an information processor that serves to resolve uncertainty in the environment.

Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) is a popular framework for that has been used to investigate processing capacity across many psychological domains over the past 25+ years. To date, it had been assumed that no processing resources are used for sources in which no signal has been presented (i.e., in a location that can contain a signal but does not on a given trial). Hence, response times are purely driven by the signal-containing location or locations. This assumption is critical to the underlying mathematics of the capacity coefficient measure of SFT. In this article, we show that stimulus locations influence response times even when they contain no signal, and that this influence has repercussions for the interpretation of processing capacity under the SFT framework, particularly in conjunctive (AND) tasks-where positive responses require detection of signals in multiple locations. We propose a modification to the AND task requiring participants to fully identify both target locations on all trials. This modification allows a new coefficient to be derived. We apply the new coefficient to novel experimental data and resolve a previously reported empirical paradox, where observed capacity was limited in an OR detection task but super capacity in an AND detection task. Hence, previously reported differences in processing capacity between OR and AND task designs are likely to have been spurious. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).