Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Vision provides rapid processing for some tasks, but encounters strong constraints from others. Although many tasks encounter a capacity limit of processing four visual objects at once, some evidence suggests far lower limits for processing relationships among objects. What is our capacity limit for relational processing? If it is indeed limited, then people may miss important relationships between data values in a graph. To test this question, we asked people to explore graphs of trivially simple 2 × 2 data sets and found that half of the viewers missed surprising and improbable relationships (e.g., a child's height decreasing over time). These relationships were spotted easily in a control condition, which implicitly directed viewers to prioritize inspecting the key relationships. Thus, a severe limit on relational processing, combined with a cascade of other capacity-limited operations (e.g., linking values to semantic content), makes understanding a graph more like slowly reading a paragraph then immediately recognizing an image. These results also highlight the practical importance of "data storytelling" techniques, where communicators design graphs that help their audience prioritize the most important relationships in data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite studying a list of items only minutes earlier, when reencountered in a recognition memory test, undergraduate participants often say with total confidence that they have not studied some of the items before. Such high confidence miss (HCM) responses have been taken as evidence of rapid and complete forgetting and of everyday amnesia (Roediger & Tekin, 2020). We investigated (a) if memory for HCMs is completely lost or whether a residual memory effect exists and (b) whether dominant decision models predict the effect. Participants studied faces (Experiments 1a, 2, and 3) or words (Experiment 1b), then completed a single-item recognition memory task, followed by either (a) a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task, in which the studied and nonstudied alternatives on each trial were matched for their previous old/new decision and confidence rating (Experiments 1 and 2) or (b) a second single-item recognition task in which the targets and foils were HCMs and high confidence correct rejections, respectively (Experiment 3). In each experiment, participants reliably distinguished HCMs from high-confidence correct rejections. The unequal variance signal detection and dual-process signal detection models were fit to the single-item recognition data, and the parameter estimates were used to predict the memory effect for HCMs. The dual-process signal detection model predicted the residual memory effect (as did another popular model, the mixture signal detection theory model). However, the unequal variance signal detection model incorrectly predicted a negative, or no, effect, invalidating this model. The residual memory effect for HCMs demonstrates that everyday amnesia is not associated with complete memory loss and distinguishes between decision models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Many social ties end when one side rejects the other, but rejection does not need to happen directly. Ghosting-the act of ending a relationship by ignoring another person's attempts to connect-is a common way of ending social ties. The present experiments first establish the key characteristics of ghosting and distinguish it from other rejection behaviors (Pilot Studies 1a-1c). The experiments then proceed to explore the relational and motivational implications of this behavior, finding that ghosters (those who ghost) care about the well-being of ghostees (those who are ghosted) more than ghostees realize. This result occurs in recalled instances of ghosting (Experiment 1), when ghosting in real time (Experiment 2), and when refraining from ghosting is monetarily costly (Experiment 3). We find that this occurs partly because ghostees underestimate the other-oriented motives involved in ghosting, misunderstanding that ghosters ghost partly as a way to end a tie while avoiding hurting ghostees' feelings (Experiments 4-6). Indeed, greater other-oriented motives lead to a higher likelihood of ghosting others (Experiment 7). A final experiment finds relational consequences whereby ghostees miss out on opportunities for future help exchange due to their underestimation of the extent to which ghosters care about them (Experiment 8). Ghosting is social rejection without explanation or feedback, but not without care. This study highlights how prosocial motives can drive rejection behaviors and the role of interpersonal accuracy in mitigating the negative effects of social rejection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Moral judgments and emotional reactions to sociomoral violations are heavily impacted by a perpetrator's intentions and desires, which pose a threat to social harmony. Given that older adults are more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony relative to younger adults, older adults may be more reactive to malicious desires. In three studies, we investigated adult age differences in moral judgments and emotional reactions to sociomoral violations. In all studies, participants read scenarios in which a perpetrator either (a) desired to harm another but nothing happened, or (b) harmed another accidentally without malicious desire. Study 2 incorporated additional scenarios designed to evoke anger and disgust without explicitly implicating another person to evaluate whether age differences emerge only when sociomoral violations against another are salient. In Study 3, we examined the combined effects of malicious desires and harmful outcomes by including scenarios in which (a) harmful desires were coupled with harmful outcomes, and (b) benign desires were coupled with benign outcomes. Predominantly across the studies, older adults judged perpetrators who desired to harm another more harshly but judged perpetrators who accidentally harmed another more leniently than younger adults. Emotional reactions generally corresponded with the differences in judgments. Taken together, this work suggests that desires more strongly impact older relative to younger adults' judgments and emotional reactions in sociomoral contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

What are the sources of individual-level differences in risk taking, and how do they depend on the domain or situation in which the decision is being made? Psychologists currently answer such questions with psychometric methods, which analyze correlations across participant responses in survey data sets. In this article, we analyze the preferences that give rise to these correlations. Our approach uses (a) large language models (LLMs) to quantify everyday risky behaviors in terms of the attributes or reasons that may describe those behaviors, and (b) decision models to map these attributes and reasons onto participant responses. We show that LLM-based decision models can explain observed correlations between behaviors in terms of the reasons different behaviors elicit and explain observed correlations between individuals in terms of the weights different individuals place on reasons, thereby providing a decision theoretic foundation for psychometric findings. Since LLMs can generate quantitative representations for nearly any naturalistic decision, they can be used to make accurate out-of-sample predictions for hundreds of everyday behaviors, predict the reasons why people may or may not want to engage in these behaviors, and interpret these reasons in terms of core psychological constructs. Our approach has important theoretical and practical implications for the study of heterogeneity in everyday behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Commencement speakers, business leaders, and the popular press tell us that failure has at least one benefit: It fuels success. Does it? Across 11 studies, including a field study of medical professionals, predictors overestimated the rate at which people course correct following failure (Studies 1-4). Predictors overestimated the likelihood that professionals who fail a professional exam (e.g., the bar exam, the medical boards) pass a retest (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2a), the likelihood that patients improve their health after a crisis (e.g., heart attack, drug overdose; Studies 2b and 6), and the probability, more generally, of learning from one's mistakes (Studies 3-5). This effect was specific to overestimating success following failure (Study 4) and erasing mention of an initial failure that had actually occurred corrected the problem (Studies 2a and 2b). The success overestimate was due, at least in part, to the belief that people attend to failure more than they do (Studies 5 and 6). Correcting this overestimate had policy implications. Citizens apprised of the sobering true rate of postfailure success increased their support for rehabilitative initiatives aimed at helping struggling populations (e.g., people with addiction, ex-convicts) learn from past mistakes (Studies 7a-7c). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Practicing retrieval is a potent learning enhancer. Theoretical accounts of the testing effect generally suggest that the magnitude of the testing effect is dependent on retrieval practice performance, such that conditions that promote better retrieval practice performance should result in a greater testing effect. Empirical evidence, however, has been mixed. Although some studies showed a positive association between retrieval practice performance and the testing effect, others have shown either no relation or the reverse. In the present study, we experimentally manipulated retrieval practice performance using a retrieval-based response deadline manipulation and an encoding-based study trial manipulation. Across six experiments, the magnitude of the testing effect was independent of retrieval practice performance. However, when we aggregated the data across the experiments, participants with superior retrieval practice performance showed a greater testing effect-an individual difference. This dissociation between experimental and correlational outcomes suggests that the positive relation between retrieval practice performance and the testing effect is not causal, and indeed, simulation data showed that the correlation between retrieval practice performance and testing effect was an artifact. We discuss the challenges these findings present to existing accounts of the testing effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive flexibility enables humans to voluntarily switch tasks. Task switching requires replacing the previously active task representation with a new one, an operation that typically results in a switch cost. Thus, understanding cognitive flexibility requires understanding how tasks are represented in the brain. We hypothesize that task representations are cognitive map-like, such that the magnitude of the difference between task representations reflects their conceptual differences: The greater the distinction between the two task representations, the more updating is required. This hypothesis predicts that switch costs should increase with between task dissimilarity. To test this hypothesis, we use an experimental design that parametrically manipulates the similarity between task rules. We observe that response time scales with the dissimilarity between the task rules. The findings shed light on the organizational principles of task representations and extend the conventional binary task-switch effect (task repeat vs. switch) to a theoretical framework with parametric task switches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The ecology of human communication is face to face. In these contexts, speakers dynamically modify their communication across vocal (e.g., speaking rate) and gestural (e.g., cospeech gestures related in meaning to the content of speech) channels while speaking. What is the function of these adjustments? Here we ask whether speakers dynamically make these adjustments to increase communicative success, and decrease cognitive effort while speaking. We assess whether speakers modulate word durations and produce iconic (i.e., imagistically evoking properties of referents) gestures depending on the predictability of each word they utter. Predictability is operationalized as surprisal and computed from computational language models trained on corpora of child-directed, or adult-directed language. Using data from a novel corpus (Ecological Language Corpus) of naturalistic interactions between adult-child (aged 3-4), and adult-adult, we show that surprisal predicts speakers' multimodal adjustments and that some of these effects are modulated by whether the comprehender is a child or an adult. Thus, communicative efficiency applies generally across vocal and gestural communicative channels not being limited to structural properties of language or vocal modality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Older adults tend to be more prone to distraction compared with young adults, and this age-related deficit has been attributed to a deficiency in inhibitory processing. However, recent findings challenge the notion that aging leads to global impairments in inhibition. To reconcile these mixed findings, we investigated how aging modulates multiple mechanisms of attentional control by tracking the timing and direction of eye movements. When engaged in feature-search mode and proactive distractor suppression, older adults made fewer first fixations to the target but inhibited the task-irrelevant salient distractor as effectively as did young adults. However, when engaged in singleton-search mode and required to reactively disengage from the distractor, older adults made significantly more first saccades toward the task-irrelevant salient distractor and showed increased fixation times in orienting to the target, longer dwell times on incorrect saccades, and increased saccadic reaction times compared with young adults. Our findings reveal that aging differently impairs attentional control depending on whether visual search requires proactive distractor suppression or reactive distractor disengagement. Furthermore, our oculomotor measures reveal both age-related deficits and age equivalence in various mechanisms of attention, including goal-directed orienting, selection history, disengagement, and distractor inhibition. These findings help explain why conclusions of age-related declines or age equivalence in mechanisms of attentional control are task specific and reveal that older adults do not exhibit global impairments in mechanisms of inhibition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).