Experimental psychology最新文献

The production effect is the finding that, relative to silent reading, producing information at study (e.g., reading aloud) leads to a benefit in memory. In most studies of this effect, individuals are presented with a set of unique items, and they produce a subset of these items (e.g., they are presented with the to-be-remembered target item TABLE and produce table) such that the production is both unique and representative of the target. Across two preregistered experiments, we examined the influence of a production that is unique but that does not match the target (e.g., producing fence to the target TABLE, producing car to the target TREE, and so on). This kind of production also yielded a significant effect-the mismatching production effect-although it was smaller than the standard production effect (i.e., when productions are both unique and representative of their targets) and was detectable only when targets with standard productions were included in the same study phase (i.e., when the type of production was manipulated within participant). We suggest that target-production matching is an important precursor to the production effect and that the kind of production that brings about a benefit depends on the other productions that are present.

Mathematical models explaining production effects assume that production leads to the encoding of additional features, such as phonological ones. This improves memory with a combination of encoding strength and feature distinctiveness, implementing aspects of propositional theories. However, it is not clear why production differs from other manipulations such as study time and spaced repetition, which are also thought to influence strength. Here we extend attentional subsetting theory and propose an explanation based on the dimensionality of feature spaces. Specifically, we suggest phonological features are drawn from a compact feature space. Deeper features are sparsely subselected from a larger subspace. Algebraic and numerical solutions shed light on several findings, including the dependency of production effects on how other list items are encoded (differing from other strength factors) and the production advantage even for homophones. This places production within a continuum of strength-like manipulations that differ in terms of the feature subspaces they operate upon and leads to novel predictions based on direct manipulations of feature-space properties.

There is evidence suggesting that bilingual individuals demonstrate an advantage over monolinguals in performing various tasks related to memory and executive functions. The characteristics of this bilingual advantage are not unanimously agreed upon in the literature, and some even doubt it exists. The heterogeneity of the bilingual population may explain this inconsistency. Hence, it is important to identify different subgroups of bilinguals and characterize their cognitive performance. The current study focuses on the production effect, a well-established memory phenomenon, in bilingual young adults differing in their English and Hebrew proficiency levels, and the possible balanced bilingual advantage. The aims of this study are (1) to evaluate the production effect in three groups of bilingual participants: English-dominant bilinguals, Hebrew-dominant bilinguals, and balanced bilinguals, and (2) to examine whether memory advantage depends on varying degrees of bilingualism. One hundred twenty-one bilingual young adults who speak English and Hebrew at different levels participated. All learned lists of familiar words, in English and Hebrew, half by reading aloud and half by silent reading, followed by free recall tests. As expected, a production effect (better memory for aloud words than for silent words) was found for all groups in both languages. Balanced bilinguals remembered more words than did dominant participants, demonstrating a memory advantage in both languages. These findings support the hypothesis that the presence of cognitive advantage in bilingualism depends on the acquisition of a good proficiency level in each of the languages, with direct implications for family language policy and bilingual education.

When we look at a picture, we tend to remember it by enriching the constructed mental representation with elements not present but probable outside the current view. The tendency to remember the perceived view with a broader scope is known as boundary extension (BE). Does BE benefit from paying reduced attention to the picture? While attention plays a central role in memory, only a few studies to date have investigated this question in the field of BE. In this research, participants completed a BE task in single- and dual-task conditions. The results indicate that BE is eliminated when the attention is divided on the onset of scene construction. We therefore discuss the role of attention in BE.

Gaze directed at the observer (direct gaze) is a highly salient social signal. Despite the existence of a preferential orientation toward direct gaze, none of the studies carried out so far seem to have explicitly studied the time course of information processing during gaze direction judgment. In an eye direction judgment task, participants were presented with a sketch of a face. A temporal asynchrony was introduced between the presentation of the eyes and that of the rest of the face. Indeed, the face could be presented before the eyes, the eyes could be presented before the face, or the face and the eyes could be presented simultaneously. In a second time, the face direction was also manipulated. The results suggest that the time course of information processing during eye direction judgment follows a continuum that makes it possible to perceive the eyes first and then to use the facial context to judge the direction of gaze. Furthermore, the congruency between the direction of gaze and that of the face confirms this observation. Although these results are discussed in the light of existing theories about the mechanisms underlying gaze processing, our data provide new information suggesting that, despite their power to capture attention, the eyes probably have to stand out from a more general spatial configuration (i.e., the face) in order for their direction to be adequately processed.

Research has shown that people automatically imitate others and that this tendency is stronger when the other person is a human compared with a nonhuman agent. However, a controversial question is whether automatic imitation is also modulated by whether people believe the other person is a human. Although early research supported this hypothesis, not all studies reached the same conclusion and a recent meta-analysis found that there is currently neither evidence in favor nor against an influence of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation. One of the most prominent studies supporting such an influence is the study by Liepelt and Brass (2010), who found that automatic imitation was stronger when participants believed an ambiguous, gloved hand to be human, as opposed to wooden. In this registered report, we provide a high-powered replication of this study (N = 199). In contrast to Liepelt and Brass (2010), we did not find an effect of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation. However, we did find a correlation between automatic imitation and perceived self-other similarity. Together, these results suggest that the gloved hand procedure does not reliably influence automatic imitation, but interindividual differences in perceived similarity do.

In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/-/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme "rime" /vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former condition than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model (Hannagan et al., 2013) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.

While performing two actions at the same time has mostly been associated with reduced performance, several recent studies have observed the opposite effect, that is, dual-action benefits. Previous evidence suggests that dual-action benefits result from single-action inhibitory costs - more specifically, it appears that under certain circumstances, single-action representations are derived from dual-action representations by removing (i.e., inhibiting) one of the component actions. In the present paper, we investigated if this is tied to the presence of multi-modal response demands (i.e., responses making use of two different effector systems). We implemented a very simple experimental paradigm where participants responded to a single stimulus with zero, one, or two uni-modal responses. As predicted, we did not observe dual-action benefits, but rather significant dual-action costs. Furthermore, a trial-by-trial sequence analysis revealed that alternations between both single-action responses were associated with significantly better performance than all other types of action switches. This can be accounted for by assuming that actions are represented as "feature bundles" and that switching a single, binary distinctive feature of an action to its opposite is relatively easy.

This study investigated the effects of semantic overlap from multiple sources on false memories. Participants were presented with paired study lists comprising items highly associated with one nonstudied critical item. There were three types of list pairs: (1) the sharing condition, in which the words in both lists were classified into different semantic groups that converged on the same critical word (semantic overlap), (2) the repetition condition, in which the two lists comprised identical words, and (3) the single condition, in which the paired lists were attributed to different semantic groups that did not share a critical item. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with the paired study lists and responded to free recall tests and a recognition test including remember-know judgments. In Experiment 2, the participants responded to a recognition test, and the participants in Experiment 3 recalled the studied items. The results indicated that the false recall and false recognition rates in the sharing condition were higher than those in the repetition and single conditions. These results suggest that activation from multiple independent sources may have an accumulative additive effect. The findings are discussed in relation to the Activation-Monitoring theory.