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Macchi et al.: Letting people touch it changed nothing; drawing it as parts raised solving by 33 points — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed paper by Laura Macchi and colleagues at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Journal of Intelligence, 9 May 2026) testing the received wisdom that handling a problem's materials makes insight more likely. Asked to build four equilateral triangles from six pencils, participants given the real pencils went from 27.3% to 32.6% — no significant difference. But swapping a matchstick arithmetic puzzle for a photograph of real matchsticks lifted solving from 46.7% to 79.3%, with nothing to touch. What worked was not the hand, but the picture saying "I am made of parts."
McCaughey et al.: People Change How Much Information They Buy Only When They Are Told the Price Changed — Fukai Reads
An open-access, peer-reviewed paper by Linda McCaughey and two co-authors in Judgment and Decision Making. Across five experiments and 755 analyzed participants in a task where every observation costs money, people did change how much information they bought when the price changed — but almost entirely through planning ahead, not through what they experienced while playing. A direct hit for anyone pricing hints or scouting.
Hu et al.: We Judge Others' Satisfaction Without Counting Their Options — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed paper by Beidi Hu, Alice Moon and Eric VanEpps in Psychological Science (January 2026). Across six preregistered experiments with 10,092 participants, people factored choice set size into their own satisfaction but barely factored it into predictions of someone else's. Three things shrink the neglect: showing the different set sizes side by side, asking for a ranking, and restating the number of options. It bears directly on how we read playtests and pick rates.
Lu et al.: Is Flow Made of Difficulty, or of the Effort You Spend? — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed study by Hairong Lu and colleagues (Psychological Research, 2025) on flow and mental effort. Manipulating perceived difficulty and expected odds of success separately in a visual discrimination task, the difficulty manipulation landed hard (partial eta-squared = 0.64) while expectancy showed only a weak trial-level effect (d = 0.04); the inverted-U in flow was marginal (p = 0.053) and P300 showed no relation to flow. An exploratory study with N = 37.
Jeong et al.: Same Puzzle, Different Answer Buttons, Different Difficulty — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed paper on cognitive load and interaction design by Harim Jeong and colleagues (JMIR Serious Games). Holding a tablet Stroop stimulus fixed and changing only the answer options from written labels to color patches raised accuracy from 0.86 to 0.91 and cut reaction time by 85.4 ms across 127 children aged 6-12. Prefrontal neural indices showed no significant difference.
