Experimental psychology最新文献

Although the production effect is well-established in undergraduates, limited research has examined this effect in children. The primary goal of the current study was to replicate the production effect in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, one group studied all items silently or aloud (pure lists) and another group studied half of the items silently and said half aloud (mixed lists). At recall, the production effect was present in mixed lists but not in pure lists. The results suggest that the effect in mixed lists was due to both a benefit for produced items and a cost to silent items. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether preschoolers were aware of the benefits of production. The results were mixed and indicate that task difficulty may impact whether production benefits memory. When the metacognitive task was easier (Experiment 3), the production effect replicated. Preschoolers' judgments indicated they believe that production leads to better memory, but they were overconfident. The current results demonstrate that (1) young children can use production to improve memory when instructed, even before they spontaneously use it, (2) they believe production can benefit memory, and (3) task difficulty may account for discrepancies in prior work examining the production effect in children.

In memory tasks, items read aloud are better remembered than their silently read counterparts. This production effect is often interpreted by assuming a distinctiveness benefit for produced items, but whether this benefit also comes at a cost remains up for debate. In recall tasks, when pure lists are used in which all items are produced or read silently, studies have shown a better recall of produced items at the last serial positions, but a lower recall at the first positions. This cost of production has been interpreted by assuming that production interferes with rehearsal. However, in recognition tasks, models typically assume that the distinctiveness benefit for produced items comes at no cost. Across four experiments, participants completed a 2AFC recognition test, an old-new recognition test or an immediate serial recall test. List length was also manipulated. Results show that although the production effect is larger at the last serial positions, the cross-over interaction between the production effect and serial position observed in recall was not present in recognition. These results suggest that task-related differences in the production effect may inform us about the modulation of basic memory processes by task demands.

A key finding within nudging research is the default effect, where individuals are inclined to stay with a default option when faced with a decision, rather than exploring alternatives (e.g., a preselected job opportunity among two alternatives). Similarly, the study of framing effects delves into how the presentation and context of decisions influence choices (e.g., choosing vs. rejecting a job opportunity among two alternatives). Specifically, previous literature examining choosing versus rejecting decision frames in various situations has found that these frames do not invariably complement each other; therefore, individuals' preferences vary based on the task frame. Yet, simultaneous testing of multiple nudges remains relatively unexplored in the literature. In the current study involving 1,072 participants, we examined how framing and default effects can influence decision-making in hypothetical scenarios. The decision scenarios involved two different domains-work and health. We found that framing had a strong effect on decision-making in both work and health domains, whereas default setting contributed only to a limited extent in the work domain and no effect was found in the health domain, mirroring related recent research findings. We argue for a more careful design of nudge interventions when multiple overlapping nudges are used and for a contextual approach to applying behavioral science to citizens.

How confident a student is about how they answer a question has important education implications. Participants answered 10 mathematics questions and provided their estimates of how likely they got each individual item correct and how many, in total, they answered correctly. They were overconfident in these metacognitive judgments. Some of the participants were asked to justify why their answers were either correct or incorrect prior to making these judgments. This lowered their confidence ratings. They were still overconfident, but less than those in the control group. The instruction also affected the association between the confidence ratings and accuracy. No differences were observed between those asked to justify why their responses were correct versus those asked to justify why their responses were incorrect. Those asked to think about the accuracy of a response had lower confidence. This has important implications for understanding how we construct confidence judgments and within education how student confidence can be affected during assessments.

Using two executive tasks, we explored how body posture influences mind wandering, a universal internally self-generated activity. Specifically, participants were instructed to perform the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART) and the Flanker task under three postural conditions: lying supine, sitting, and standing upright. These tasks reflect the proactive and reactive modes of executive control, respectively. To measure the frequency of mind wandering, we employed the probe-caught technique, presenting prompts at irregular intervals. The results indicate that, compared to standing and sitting positions, lying supine significantly increased mind wandering, while posture had no effect on either measure of executive control. We suggest that changes in posture alter cognitive activity related to self-generated thoughts and external tasks, whereas the relationship between mind wandering and executive control requires further research.

Online experiments offer several advantages over traditional laboratory experiments. However, for reaction time experiments, precise stimulus presentation and response detection is crucial. The precision of online experiments could be compromised due to increased variance arising from varying hardware configurations among participants, lack of control over experimental conditions, and the absence of an examiner. In this study, we conducted an online experiment using the avatar-Simon task to investigate whether small differences in reaction times could be examined using online experiments conducted with the experimental toolkit PsyToolkit. In the avatar-Simon task, participants respond to the color of vertically presented stimuli in front of avatars by pressing a left or right button. Reactions are faster when the position of the stimulus, defined from the avatar's point of view, matches the position of the response. Compared to the previous laboratory experiment, we observed lower effect sizes and more timeouts but were able to replicate the avatar-Simon effect overall. Based on further distributional and reliability analyses, PsyToolkit appears to be suitable tool to detect behavioral effects in the range of tens of milliseconds. We discuss differences and similarities with the original laboratory study and suggest how to address potential problems associated with online experiments.

Most cognitive psychological studies assume that participants in lab-based tasks maintain a single goal based on task instructions. However, people can be motivated by other factors, such as curiosity. We examined if people attend to seemingly task-irrelevant information out of curiosity by manipulating stimulus uncertainty in a cueing paradigm. Participants were presented with an abrupt-onset cue followed by a letter target (E or H). Next, a mask either at the target location (low uncertainty) or at all four locations (high uncertainty) was shown. We expected high uncertainty to induce a state of curiosity that in turn influences the processing of the cue. Cueing effects were greater in the high-uncertainty condition compared to the low-uncertainty condition. In Experiment 2, we additionally elicited self-report ratings on curiosity. In sum, target-specific uncertainty leads to greater processing of task-irrelevant peripheral cues across two experiments. We tentatively conclude that uncertainty modulates attention control and further research is necessary to examine if this is indeed due to curiosity induced by uncertainty.

Learning information may benefit from movement: Items that are spoken aloud are more accurately remembered than items that are silently read (the production effect). Candidate mechanisms for this phenomenon suggest that speaking may enrich or improve the feature content of memory traces, yet research suggests that prior language skill also plays a role. Recent work showed a larger production effect in bilinguals for words in their second language (L2) compared to their first language (L1), potentially suggesting that bilinguals engage different or additional linguistic features when speaking L2 compared to L1 words. The current study examined whether the increased L2 production effect reduces for L2 and L1 pseudowords, which may similarly engage mainly phonological features. German (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals first read (out loud or silently) and subsequently recognized German or English words or pseudowords following German or English phonology. The production effect increased for L2 compared to L1 items and for words compared to pseudowords. Modest evidence suggested L2-L1 similarity in production effect scores for pseudowords, but different L2-L1 scores for words. Integrating feature models of memory with models of bilingual language production, we propose that speaking an L2 may engage more extensive and diverse linguistic features than an L1.

Prior evidence has indicated that the act of producing a word aloud is more effortful than reading a word silently, and this effort is related to the subsequent memory advantage for produced words. In the current study, we further examined the contributions of reading effort to the overall production effect by making silent reading more effortful. To do this, participants studied words that were presented in standard lowercase font format and words that were presented in an aLtErNaTiNg CaSe font format (which should be more effortful to read). Half of the words in each font condition were read aloud, and half were read silently. Participants completed an old/new recognition test. Experiment 1 was conducted online; Experiment 2 was conducted in-lab and recorded reading times at study to confirm that alternating case font slows reading. In both experiments, we found a production effect in recognition that was uninfluenced by font type. We also found that alternating case font selectively increased recollection (but not familiarity) relative to lowercase font. Thus, the additional time to read words in a disfluent font does not appear to interact with memory benefit of producing words aloud.