Trial reportScientific reports2017
Beliefs about Others' Abilities Alter Learning from Observation.
Trial report in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- How social learning enhances-or undermines-efficiency and flexibility in collective decision-making under uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Affective observation guides expectations about others' emotional reactions to unfamiliar action outcomes.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Effects of described demonstrator ability on brain and behavior when learning from others.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Causal involvement of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in learning the predictability of observable actions.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A boost in self-esteem after positive social evaluation predicts social and non-social learning.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The actions of others act as a pseudo-reward to drive imitation in the context of social reinforcement learning.PLoS biology · 2020Article
- The neural and computational systems of social learning.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Review
- Depressive symptoms are associated with blunted reward learning in social contexts.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Learning what is dangerous by observing others can be safer and more efficient than individual learning. The efficiency of observational learning depends on how observational information is used, something we propose depends on our beliefs' about others. Here, we investigated how described and actual abilities of another individual (a demonstrator) influenced performance and psychophysiology during learning of an observational avoidance task. Participants were divided into two groups. In each group there were two demonstrators who were described as either high (Described-High group) or low (Described-Low group) in their ability to learn the task. In both groups, one demonstrator had a high ability (Actual-High) and the other had a low ability (Actual-Low) to learn. Participants performed worse in the Described-Low compared to the Described-High group. Pupil dilation, and behavioral data in combination with reinforcement learning modeling, suggested that the described ability influenced performance by affecting the level of attention towards the observational information. Skin conductance responses and pupil dilation provided us with a separate measure of learning in addition to choice behavior.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.