Experimental psychology最新文献

When participants read a text for comprehension while identifying a target letter, the letter is more often missed in a frequent function word than in a less frequent content word. This is the missing-letter effect. Studies have shown the importance of both frequency and word function. The role of each of these factors in development is less understood. The goal of this study was to revisit the influence of frequency and word function in the missing-letter effect in development with better-controlled stimuli. Two hundred sixteen participants took part in this study and were divided into five groups (6-7 years, 8 years, 9 years, 10-11 years, and university students). They were asked to read four experimental texts for comprehension and to circle a target letter. The results showed a basic missing-letter effect with more omissions for a frequent function word than a less frequent content word for every group. When frequency was controlled, we found a word function effect as early as 6-7 years of age, with more omissions for a function word than a content word. In contrast, when word function was controlled, an effect of frequency was only significant for adults and 8-year-olds. These results clarify discrepancies in the literature and support the importance of rigorous stimuli control.

Mood has been argued to impact the breadth of human attention, but the empirical evidence supporting this claim remains shaky. Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008) have attributed previous empirical inconsistencies regarding the effect of mood on attentional breath to a critical role of approach/avoidance motivation. They demonstrated that the combination of positive affect with high, but not with low, motivational intensity improves performance during processing local information and impairs performance during processing global information. The latter, but not the former, was replicated by Domachowska et al. (2016). Since we were interested in the modulation of attention by valence and motivation, and considering the inconsistencies in the findings, we replicated the critical experiments of both studies in four online experiments but found no significant effect of either valence or motivational intensity on attention. Taken together, our evidence casts doubt on a systematic relationship between mood or motivation on the one hand and global/local processing on the other.

The ability to learn sequences depends on different factors governing sequence structure, such as transitional probability (TP, probability of a stimulus given a previous stimulus), adjacent or nonadjacent dependency, and frequency. Current evidence indicates that adjacent and nonadjacent pairs are not equally learnable; the same applies to second-order and first-order TPs and to the frequency of the sequences. However, the relative importance of these factors and interactive effects on learning remain poorly understood. The first experiment tested the effects of TPs and dependency separately on the learning of nonlinguistic visual sequences, and the second experiment used the factors of the first experiment and added a frequency factor to test their interactive effects with verbal sequences of stimuli (pseudo-words). The results of both experiments showed higher performance during online learning for first-order TPs in adjacent pairs. Moreover, Experiment 2 indicated poorer performance during offline recall for nonadjacent dependencies and low-frequency sequences. We discuss the results that different factors are not used equally in prediction and memorization.

Leisure air travel is a popular form of tourism, but its emissions are a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. Restrictions to leisure air travel have previously received little support; however, the same restrictions to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been popular. This support is unlikely to persist in a postpandemic world, highlighting the need for alternative ways to improve support for reducing leisure air travel. Anthropomorphism of nature has consistently predicted proenvironmental behavior, which has been mediated by guilt felt for harm to the environment. This research is the first empirical study to explore this relationship in the context of COVID-19, where it examined support for restricting leisure air travel to help mitigate (1) COVID-19 and (2) climate change. In an experimental online study, Australian residents (N = 325, M_age = 54.48, SD_age = 14.63, 62% women) were recruited through social media. Anthropomorphism of nature in the context of COVID-19 (AMP-19) was manipulated through exposure to a news article. Participants then completed measures of environmental guilt and support for restricting leisure air travel to mitigate COVID-19 (LAT-19) and to mitigate climate change (LAT-CC). A significant indirect effect was observed in both models, such that AMP-19 predicted environmental guilt which in turn predicted LAT-19 (f² = .26; BCI [0.66, 3.87]) and LAT-CC (f² = .45; BCI [0.84, 5.06]). The results imply that anthropomorphism of nature in the context of COVID-19 can improve attitudes toward this proenvironmental behavior, with greater support when this was to mitigate climate change. Implications are discussed.

The mediator effectiveness hypothesis states the benefit of retrieval practice is a consequence of the activation of mediators linking cue and target items during review. Evidence has found that mediators are more effective at prompting recall of target words than words not associated with the original cue, a pattern that is larger following testing than restudy. The benefit of testing for unstudied cues at the final test is referred to as transfer of test-enhanced learning. The current study examined whether the activation of mediators is moderated by the depth of processing completed at encoding. During an initial study of weakly related word pairs (e.g., Mother-CHILD), participants completed an encoding task that directed deep, shallow, or no specific depth of processing. During review, participants restudied the pairs or attempted to recall the target given the original cue (e.g., Mother). On the final test, participants were presented with unstudied cues that were related to either the original cue (mediators, e.g., Father) or the target (target-related cues, e.g., Baby). The results found mediator generation during review to be greatly impaired by shallow processing tasks completed during encoding. In contrast, the effectiveness of target-related cues was not affected by depth of processing tasks.

Lists of semantically related words are better recalled than lists of unrelated words on immediate serial recall tests. Prominent explanations for this beneficial effect of semantic relatedness, such as the item/order hypothesis, invoke differential contributions of item and order information and predict that on tests that de-emphasize item information, the effect of semantic relatedness will be abolished. The prediction is hard to assess because previous studies using reconstruction of order tests show conflicting and equivocal results. Three experiments are reported that were designed to minimize problems associated with extant studies and that will allow reassessment of the prediction that semantic relatedness will have no effect on reconstruction of order tests. The experiments replicated the usual beneficial effect of semantic relatedness on memory when the test was serial recall but found no effect when the test was reconstruction of order. These results were observed regardless of whether semantic relatedness was defined by category membership (Experiment 1), association (Experiment 2), or meaning (Experiment 3). These results clarify earlier results in the literature and confirm a strong prediction of the item/order hypothesis.

In Western cultures where people read and write from left to right, time is represented along a spatial continuum that goes from left to right (past to future), known as the mental timeline (MTL). In language, this MTL was supported by space-time congruency effects: People are faster to make lexical decisions to words conveying past or future information when left/right manual responses are compatible with the MTL. Alternatively, in cultures where people read from right to left, space-time congruency effects go in the opposite direction. Such cross-cultural differences suggest that repeated writing and reading dynamic movements are critically involved in the spatial representation of time. In most experiments on the space-time congruency effect, participants use their hand for responding, an effector that is associated to the directionality of writing. To investigate the role of the directionality of reading in the space-time congruency effect, we asked participants to make lateralized eye movements (left or right saccades) to indicate whether stimuli were real words or not (lexical decision). Eye movement responses were slower and higher in amplitude for responses incompatible with the direction of the MTL. These results reinforce the claim that repeated directional reading and writing movements promote the embodiment of time-related words.

Over the past few decades, psychology and its cognate disciplines have undergone substantial scientific reform, ranging from advances in statistical methodology to significant changes in academic norms. One aspect of experimental design that has received comparatively little attention is incentivization, i.e., the way that participants are rewarded and incentivized monetarily for their participation in experiments and surveys. While incentive-compatible designs are the norm in disciplines like economics, the majority of studies in psychology and experimental philosophy are constructed such that individuals' incentives to maximize their payoffs in many cases stand opposed to their incentives to state their true preferences honestly. This is in part because the subject matter is often self-report data about subjective topics, and the sample is drawn from online platforms like Prolific or MTurk where many participants are out to make a quick buck. One mechanism that allows for the introduction of an incentive-compatible design in such circumstances is the Bayesian Truth Serum (BTS; Prelec, 2004), which rewards participants based on how surprisingly common their answers are. Recently, Schoenegger (2021) applied this mechanism in the context of Likert-scale self-reports, finding that the introduction of this mechanism significantly altered response behavior. In this registered report, we further investigate this mechanism by (1) attempting to directly replicate the previous result and (2) analyzing if the Bayesian Truth Serum's effect is distinct from the effects of its constituent parts (increase in expected earnings and addition of prediction tasks). We fail to find significant differences in response behavior between participants who were simply paid for completing the study and participants who were incentivized with the BTS. Per our pre-registration, we regard this as evidence in favor of a null effect of up to V = .1 and a failure to replicate but reserve judgment as to whether the BTS mechanism should be adopted in social science fields that rely heavily on Likert-scale items reporting subjective data, seeing that smaller effect sizes might still be of practical interest and results may differ for items different from the ones we studied. Further, we provide weak evidence that the prediction task itself influences response distributions and that this task's effect is distinct from an increase in expected earnings, suggesting a complex interaction between the BTS' constituent parts and its truth-telling instructions.

We constantly move our eyes to new information while inspecting a scene, but these patterns of eye movements change based on the task and goals of the observer. Inhibition of return (IOR) may facilitate visual search by reducing the likelihood of revisiting previously attended locations. However, IOR may present in any visual task, or it may be search-specific. We investigated the presence of IOR in foraging, memorization, change detection, and two versions of visual search. One version of search used a static search array that remained stable throughout the trial, but the second used a scene flickering paradigm similar to the change detection task. IOR was observed in both versions of visual search, memorization, and foraging, but not in change detection. Visual search and change detection both had temporal nonscene components, and we observed that IOR could be maintained despite the scene removal but only for search. Although IOR is maintained in scene coordinates, short disruptions to this scene are insufficient to completely remove the inhibitory tags. Finally, we compare return saccades in trials without a probe and observe fewer return saccades in tasks for which IOR was observed, providing further evidence that IOR might serve as a novelty drive.