Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

The numerical distance effect (NDE) is an important tool for probing the nature of numerical representation. Across two studies, we assessed the degree to which the NDE relates to one's performance on spatial tasks to investigate the role of spatial processing in numerical comparison and, by extension, numerical cognition. We administered numerical comparison tasks and a variety of tasks thought to tap into different aspects of spatial processing. Importantly, we administered both the simultaneous comparison task and the comparison to a standard task, given claims that the NDEs that arise in these two tasks are different. In both studies, the NDEs elicited when comparing simultaneously presented numbers were more strongly negatively correlated with an individual's performance on the spatial tasks than the NDEs elicited when comparing numbers to a standard. The implications of these data for our understanding of numerical comparison tasks and numerical cognition more generally are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Teaching is the primary way children learn about the world. However, successful learning involves recognizing when teaching is ineffective, even in the absence of overt cues, and divesting from ineffective teaching to explore novel solutions. Across three experiments, we investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to recognize ineffective teaching; we tested the hypothesis that girls may be less likely than boys to divest by exploring new solutions, given documented gender differences in socialization toward conformity and obedience. Overall, we demonstrate that children independently tested taught solutions and, upon learning that the solutions were ineffective, rationally traded off between instruction and exploration. Simultaneously, gender differences in divestment emerged. On average, girls demonstrated greater persistence in applying the taught solution, while boys tended to explore their own ideas, leading to differences in solving and learning. Importantly, these differences were observable across both masculine- and feminine-stereotyped tasks. These results have important implications for children's learning and the development of leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention is a multifaceted mechanism operating on space, features, and memory. Previous studies reported both decline and preservation of attention in aging. Yet, it is unclear if healthy aging differentially affects attentional selection in these domains. To address these inconsistencies, we evaluated the ability to focus attention using a battery of 11 tasks in a large sample of younger and older adults (n = 172/174). We addressed whether (a) individual differences and aging effects are consistent across different attention tasks and (b) there is a domain-specific or domain-general age-related decline in focused attention. Both younger and older adults benefited from focusing attention on space, features, and memory representations. Confirmatory factor analysis showed substantial commonalities in baseline performance across all tasks, indicating shared variance in decision-making and memory processes. Focused-attention effects, however, formed separate factors reflecting spatial-, feature-, and memory-based attentional efficiency. Correlations between these factors were generally low and inconsistent for both age groups. This supports the view that focused attention is not a single ability. Within the same domain, some tasks showed a decline, whereas others showed improvement with aging, and, on average, attentional benefits were similar across age groups. Accordingly, our results are inconsistent with the claim that aging is associated with either domain-specific or domain-general decline in focused attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Biases favoring the wealthy are ubiquitous, and they support and bolster vast resource inequalities across individuals and groups; yet, when these biases are acquired remains unknown. In Experiments 1 through 5 (Total N = 232), using multiple methods, we found that 14- to 18-month-old infants track individuals' wealth (Experiments 1-5), prefer and selectively help rich (vs. poor) individuals (Experiments 2 and 3), and negatively evaluate poor individuals (Experiments 4 and 5). In two subsequent experiments with 11- to 13-month-old infants (Total N = 65), however, we find no evidence of preferences for rich (vs. poor) individuals (Experiment 6) or differential evaluations of rich and poor people (Experiment 7). Together, these results demonstrate that in the second year of life, wealth emerges as a central and robust dimension of evaluation that guides social decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Third-party intervention is a cornerstone of cooperative societies, yet we know little about how children develop an understanding of this social behavior. The present work generates a cross-cultural and developmental picture of how 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds (N = 447) across four societies (India, Germany, Uganda, and the United States) reason about third-party intervention. To do so, we measured children's obligation judgments and unstructured descriptions of third-party intervention. Although some cultural differences emerged, 6-year-olds largely considered bystanders as obligated to respond to wrongdoing, regardless of the bystander's social position. In contrast, 9- and 12-year-olds were more likely to exclusively ascribe this social responsibility to people in positions of authority. Despite these age differences, children of all ages generated role-specific descriptions of third-party intervention, with authority figures intervening in distinct ways from peers. For authority figures, children in India and Uganda described third-party intervention as involving corporal punishment or unspecified punishment, whereas children in the United States described such intervention as involving only verbal intervention (i.e., telling someone to stop). For peers, children in all societies described third-party intervention as involving reporting misdeeds to an authority. Collectively, these data show that early conceptualizations of third-party intervention are rooted in shared notions of obligation yet are also subject to cultural and contextual influences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research indicates that failure feedback leads people to tune out from the task, which is detrimental to their learning (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2019; Keith et al., 2022). The current work aims to identify ways to optimize learning from failure feedback. We conducted six preregistered experiments (N = 1,306) to replicate and extend the findings from Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach (2019) with novel tests of self-focused feedback, task expectations, and subsequent instruction. The detriments of failure feedback were replicated in Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c, which altered the focus of the feedback message to be self-focused (e.g., your answer) or task-focused (e.g., the answer). The detriments of failure feedback were also replicated in Study 2 when the task expectations were manipulated to easy versus hard. These results generally underscored the robustness of the results from the original study. However, Study 3 established boundary conditions. When it was a rule-based task and brief instructions on the rule were provided after feedback, there was no evidence of a detrimental effect of failure, and failure feedback, in some conditions, resulted in even better learning than success feedback for learning new material. We conclude that the tune-out reactions to failure during feedback disappear and may even be reversed when subsequent learning opportunities are provided. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Given a maze (e.g., in a book of puzzles), you might solve it by drawing out paths with your pencil. But even without a pencil, you might naturally find yourself mentally tracing along various paths. This "mental path tracing" may intuitively seem to depend on your (overt, conscious, voluntary) goal of wanting to get out of the maze, but might it also occur spontaneously-as a result of simply seeing the maze, via a kind of dynamic visual routine? Here, observers simply had to compare the visual properties of two probes presented in a maze. The maze itself was entirely task irrelevant, but we predicted that simply seeing the maze's visual structure would "afford" incidental mental path tracing (à la Gibson). Across four experiments, observers were slower to compare probes that were further from each other along the paths, even when controlling for lower level properties (such as the probes' brute linear separation, ignoring the maze "walls"). These results also generalized beyond mazes to other unfamiliar displays with task-irrelevant circular obstacles. This novel combination of two prominent themes from our field-affordances and visual routines-suggests that at least some visual routines may not require voluntary goals; instead, they may operate in an automatic (incidental, stimulus-driven) fashion, as a part of visual processing itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

As we interpret language moment by moment, we often encounter conflicting cues in the input that create incompatible representations of sentence meaning, which must be promptly resolved. Although ample evidence suggests that cognitive control aids in the resolution of such conflict, the methods commonly used to assess cognitive control's involvement in language comprehension provide limited information about the time course of its engagement. Here, we show that neural oscillatory activity in the theta-band (∼3-8 Hz), which is associated with cognitive control in nonlinguistic tasks like Stroop and Flanker, provides a real-time index of cognitive control during language processing. We conducted time-frequency analyses of four electroencephalogram data sets, and consistently observed that increased theta-band power was elicited by various kinds of linguistic conflict. Moreover, increases in the degree of conflict within a sentence produced greater increases in theta activity. These effects emerged as early as 300 ms from the onset of the initiating event, indicating rapid cognitive-control recruitment during sentence processing in response to conflicting representations. Crucially, the effect patterns could not be ascribed to processing difficulty that is not due to conflict (e.g., semantic implausibility was neither necessary nor sufficient to elicit theta activity). We suggest that neural oscillations in the theta-band offer a reliable way to test specific hypotheses about cognitive-control engagement during real-time language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory capacity (WMC) has received a great deal of attention in cognitive psychology partly because WMC correlates broadly with other abilities (e.g., reading comprehension, second-language proficiency, fluid intelligence) and thus seems to be a critical aspect of cognitive ability. However, it is still rigorously debated why such correlations occur. Some theories posit a single ability (e.g., attention control, short-term memory capacity, controlled memory search) as the primary reason behind WMC's predictiveness, whereas others argue that WMC is predictive because it taps into multiple abilities. Here, we tested these single- and multifaceted accounts of WMC with a large-scale (N = 974) individual-differences investigation of WMC and three hypothesized mediators: attention control, primary memory, and secondary memory. We found evidence for a multifaceted account, such that no single ability could fully mediate the relation between WMC and higher order cognition (i.e., reading comprehension and fluid intelligence). Further, such an effect held regardless of whether WMC was measured via complex span or n-back. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).