Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Proportional information is important for a range of everyday actions, from infants' and toddler's probabilistic inferences to adults' medical and financial decisions. Unfortunately, children and adults frequently make systematic errors in some proportional reasoning contexts. For example, people tend to focus more on the numerators, rather than the proportional relations, when proportions are discrete (i.e., with enumerable units) or when the subcomponents are spatially separated. Importantly, it is not that people cannot reason proportionally, as they do not make these same errors with continuous proportions presented as part of a single coherent whole. Although format-dependent variation has been shown across many studies with both children and adults, no work has systematically manipulated multiple aspects of visual, nonsymbolic proportional stimuli simultaneously to better understand which spatial factors impact proportional reasoning, and how. Here, we manipulate proportional stimuli in three ways: the availability of enumerable units (i.e., discreteness), predictability of the proportional information, and spatial separateness of the proportion subcomponents. We also formalize competing strategy explanations using mathematical models to infer people's strategies. Overall, we find that discreteness, predictability, and spatial separateness (as operationalized here) significantly impact adults' performance and strategies. Furthermore, all features interact with each other, and qualitative patterns suggest that spatial separateness and predictability may be particularly important, despite being less well-studied. By systematically varying the spatial features of proportions, we provide insight into the mechanisms that underlie proportional reasoning and highlight important interactions between spatial, numerical, and relational information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Although preliminary evidence suggests that humans often react aversely to artificial intelligence (AI)-generated creative works, we have little understanding of how robust or persistent these reactions may be. In a series of 16 preregistered experiments (N = 27,491), we examine how evaluations of creative writing are affected by whether participants believe the content is produced with an AI model. We find consistent evidence of an AI disclosure penalty: Participant evaluations of creative writing decrease when they believe writing samples were written by an AI model-or with the help of one-rather than a human author alone, and this effect is mediated by perceived authenticity. The AI disclosure penalty is sticky, persisting across evaluation metrics, contexts, kinds of written content, and multiple interventions derived from prior research aimed at moderating the effect. Our results indicate that AI disclosure penalties about creative writing may be stubbornly difficult to mitigate, at least at this time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Does what we see depend on what we know? Many findings suggest that top-down factors such as emotions, desires, and categorical knowledge affect perception. However, these findings have been met with considerable criticism due to a variety of methodological flaws, replication failures, and extremely small effect sizes. Here, we focus on one specific case in which top-down knowledge has been claimed to affect perception: memory color. Specifically, we describe a novel variant of the memory color effect that was purposefully designed to avoid these common criticisms and serves as a clear example of a top-down factor affecting perception. Specifically, we theorized that under ambiguous viewing conditions, top-down knowledge is more likely to impact perception because that knowledge will be used to disambiguate underdetermined sensory input. To test this hypothesis, we showed observers' printouts of completely desaturated objects in an ambiguous viewing condition: extremely dim light. As predicted, we found a strong, subjectively appreciable memory color effect under dim, ambiguous light, but not under bright, unambiguous light. In addition, a series of control experiments demonstrated that these effects could not simply be attributed to experimental demand characteristics. These results demonstrate that in certain situations, top-down factors can directly affect perceptual experience and appreciably alter how items appear. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

People are lazy. According to the law of least effort, people generally prefer to exert less rather than more effort to achieve the same reward. However, this research often isolates individuals from social influences, overlooking the fact that we are inherently social beings whose behavior is shaped by the norms and information we gather from others. Here, we examine whether individuals conform to both high-effort and low-effort norms equally or whether the strength of normative influence on effort choices depends on the direction of the norm. Across 12 studies (N = 1,957), participants completed a demand selection task where they repeatedly chose between a hard or easy task. While people generally avoid effort, results revealed that participants exerted significantly more effort after learning that previous participants consistently chose the harder task, compared to a control group who received no information about others' choices. Participants who were informed that others typically opted for the easier task, however, did not exert less effort than the control group and in fact exerted more effort. Even after increasing the acceptability of low effort-by enhancing the value of low effort and the psychological closeness to past participants-individuals still opposed the low-effort norm, exerting no less effort than the control group. These findings suggest that while others' behavior can inspire us to work harder, individuals show resistance to lowering their effort below what they would typically exert. While we consistently found conformity to high-effort norms, effort preferences were not influenced when hearing about others completing an unrelated task, pointing to a possible boundary condition for norm effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).