Experimental psychology最新文献

Noun-verb phrases are more efficiently remembered when they are enacted during learning than when they are only verbally studied, a phenomenon known as the enactment effect. While studies have debated whether motor information is key to this effect, our study explores whether the organization of motor information can support the enactment effect. We used the retrieval-practice paradigm to induce retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In Experiment 1, we found an RIF effect of categorization into physical motor properties (e.g., rotation-motor category), which was significantly stronger during enactment learning. In Experiment 2, we also found an RIF effect of categorization into physical motor properties with additional imagery features (e.g., the hand-physical and round-object category), but there was no significant difference between enactment learning and verbal learning. These findings suggest that motor information is fundamental to the enactment effect, but it is not primarily assimilated, even in the presence of various types of information, in the processing of action memory. We discuss these findings in the context of multimodal theory and episodic integration theory.

Dual tasks requiring sustained visual attention and upright stance are common, yet their impact on standing balance is not well understood. We investigated the role of visual attention in the maintenance of postural control, using the multiple-object tracking (MOT) task. Healthy young adults (n = 12) performed the MOT task at three object movement speeds while seated or standing. MOT performance was assessed using tracking capacity (k). Metrics calculated to assess mediolateral (ML) and anterior-posterior (AP) postural control included: maximum difference between CoM and CoP position (CoM-CoP Max), root mean square distance for center of pressure and center of mass position (CoP and CoM RMS distance), and correlation between CoM and CoP time series signals (CoM/CoP correlation). As predicted, k decreased significantly as object movement speed increased for both standing and seated conditions. Object movement speed also significantly affected AP CoM-CoP Max in seated conditions (p = .021) and AP CoM/CoP correlation for standing conditions (p = .002). The results demonstrate utility of the MOT task in understanding the role of visual attention in postural control, even though healthy young adults were able to compensate for the addition of a sustained visual attention task, with minimal deficits to postural control.

Behavior has short-term (proximal) and long-term (distal) consequences, and these consequences often involve different commodities. In particular, a commonly encountered distal consequence involves running out of resources - energy to respond, available food, ammunition, or money in the bank - that must be replenished before continuing a rewarding task. The current project examines proximal behavioral consequences in a video game (the amount of damage done to a clicked-on target as a function of waiting) and distal behavioral consequences (running out of the resources that allow the player to click on a target). When depleted, the resource replenished after a fixed amount of time. Thus, participants sometimes faced a tradeoff between behaviors that maximized their short-term reward rate and those that maximized their long-term reward rate. When the proximal contingency did not affect the short-term reward rate, the mere presence of limitations resulted in the slower use of resources, but the slowdown did not evidence strong sensitivity to the size of the resource pool nor the delay to its replenishment (Experiment 1). However, when the proximal contingency rewarded faster use of resources, participants did show sensitivity to the duration of the replenishment delay and the size of the resource pool (Experiment 2).

Our visual system is inundated with distracting objects that vie for our attention. While visual attention selects relevant information, inhibitory mechanisms might be useful to suppress the locations occupied by irrelevant distractors. Yet, there is a dearth of behavioral evidence for the active suppression of a distractor's location (ASDL) using central cues that provide preliminary information about a distractor's location. In the first two experiments, we attempt to conceptually replicate, using an online platform, experiments that provide evidence of the ASDL. We replicate the distractor cueing effect in a localization task (Experiment 1) wherein responses to targets were faster when a central arrow cued the location of an impending distractor than an empty location. This effect was larger in the first block of trials than it was in the second. In a discrimination task (Experiment 2), unlike previous studies, we found no evidence for an effect of distractor cueing. In Experiment 3, we replaced the central arrow cues with central number cues because arrow cues may elicit a symbolic shift of attention that might offset the ASDL. Once again, the best model was one in which the distractor cueing effect was absent. We replicate these failures to find evidence of the ASDL in two more experiments. The results suggest that the ASDL can be elusive and may be tied to the response system, not attention.

When responding to stimuli, response and stimulus' features are thought to be integrated into a short episodic memory trace, an event file. Repeating any of its components causes retrieval of the whole event file leading to benefits for full repetitions and changes but interference for partial repetitions. These binding effects are especially pronounced if attention is allocated to certain features. We used attentional biases caused by spider stimuli, aiming to modulate the impact of attention on retrieval. Participants discriminated the orientation of bars repeating or changing their location in prime-probe sequences. Crucially, shortly before probe target onset, an image of a spider and that of a cub appeared at one position each - one of which was spatially congruent with the following probe target. Participants were faster when responding to targets spatially congruent with a preceding spider, suggesting an attentional bias toward aversive information. Yet, neither overall binding effects differed between content of preceding spatially congruent images nor did this effect emerge when taking individual fear of spiders into account. We conclude that attentional biases toward spiders modulate overall behavior, but that this has no impact on retrieval.

According to the instance-based approach, each novel word encounter is encoded as an episodic trace, including different aspects of word knowledge (orthography, semantics, phonology) and context. Experiencing the novel word again leads to reactivating the previous instances to support word identification. Accordingly, once a link between orthography and meaning is established through several instances of co-occurrence, presenting the novel word form enhances semantic learning even if the contexts are uninformative about the meaning (Eskenazi et al., 2018). Here, we investigated whether informative contexts enhance orthographic learning in the absence of the novel word form. Participants read pseudowords in three definition-like sentences, followed by three unrelated filler sentences (baseline condition), three uninformative sentences (orthographic condition), or three informative sentences with synonyms replacing the pseudoword (semantic condition). After reading, participants were better at spelling pseudowords exposed in the semantic than in the baseline condition and recalled more definitions of the pseudowords exposed in the orthographic than in the baseline condition. Such results indicate that both semantic and orthographic learning benefit from the contexts where the target information is absent. Overall, this supports the instance-based approach and contributes to the understanding of the interplay between orthography and semantics in contextual word learning.

Acute social stress has been shown to influence social decision-making. This study aimed to examine how social distance modulates the influence of acute social stress on young male moral decision-making. Sixty healthy male college students were randomly divided to be exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or a placebo version of the TSST (P-TSST) before they performed moral decision-making tasks. The results showed that participants under acute social stress showed obvious increases in subjective stress perception, negative affect, salivary cortisol, and alpha-amylase and made more altruistic choices for others compared to the control group. However, social distance regulates the promotion of this acute social stress, with the promotion effect being stronger in socially distant others. Furthermore, the interpersonal order difference of different social distances in altruistic decisions is smaller in low-conflict dilemmas than in high-conflict dilemmas. In addition, an increase in salivary cortisol was positively correlated with altruistic choices toward both acquaintances and strangers, whereas an increase in salivary alpha-amylase was only positively correlated with altruistic choices toward friends. The results suggest that social distance modulates the promotion of acute social stress on moral decision-making, which might stem from the divergent effects of cortisol and alpha-amylase.

Selective attention might be space-, feature-, and/or object-based. Clear support for the involvement of an object-based mechanism is rather scarce, possibly because the predictions of models from these different classes often overlap. Yet, only object-based models can account for a larger congruency effect (CE) in the Eriksen flanker task when flankers are more (vs. less) strongly grouped to the target, but spacing and other response-irrelevant features of target and flankers are held constant. Exactly this was observed by Kramer and Jacobson (1991). So far, this theoretically relevant finding has not been replicated closely. We replicated the finding in two web-based experiments. Specifically, CEs were larger when flanker lines were connected to the central target line (vs. to outer neutral lines). We also successfully fitted the Diffusion Model for Conflict tasks (DMC) to the experimental data. Critically, diffusion modeling (DMC) and distributional analyses (delta functions) revealed that object membership primarily affected target processing strength rather than strength or timing of flanker processing. This challenges the prominent attentional spreading (sensory enhancement) account of object-based selective attention and motivates an alternative target attenuation account.

Current research describes a particular component of the self-concept that influences a wide variety of cognitive processes while it depicts a rather basic component of the self-concept. However, this minimal self seems to be anything but simple; in fact, it seems to be highly functional. Based on previous findings on newly formed self-associations, we put the postulated functionality of this minimal self to another test by retesting its protection mechanisms against negative content. In a pilot experiment, we did not find an overall reduction of negative self-assignments against neutral self-assignments. However, the results indicated an initial difference (as hypothesized) between negative and neutral self-assignments, which decreases over the course of the experiment. We put this interactive effect of valence and block to test in our main experiment, which replicated the data pattern of the pilot experiment. In sum, the results indicate a mandatory integration of stimuli into the self-concept and also a reduction of the integration due to negative valence, thereby supporting a robust protection mechanism.