Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Recent analyses of social media activity indicate that outgroup animosity drives user engagement more than ingroup favoritism, with content that derogates the outgroup tending to generate more viral responses online. However, it is unclear whether those findings are due to most people's underlying preferences or structural features of the social media landscape. To address this uncertainty, we conducted three experimental studies (N_overall = 609) to examine how intended impact (ingroup favoritism/outgroup derogation) influences intentions to share both true and false news posts among U.S. partisans who regularly use social media. Participants consistently preferred to share posts that favor their own party over those that denigrate the opposition-a preference that was largely maintained despite a manipulation of ingroup threat or a manipulated desire to share viral content in Studies 2 and 3. We discuss the influence of polarized politicians and their followers, malign actors, and social media algorithms as potential drivers of earlier results that highlight the virality of derogatory content. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

It has long been debated whether latent memory signals determine recognition judgments directly or through a small number of discrete states. Often, signal detection theory (SDT) models instantiate the former perspective, whereas the two-high-threshold (2HT) model instantiates the latter. Kellen and Klauer (2014) conducted a critical test using a ranking paradigm that yielded results in line with common SDT models and incompatible with the 2HT model. However, Malejka et al. (2022) recently challenged their conclusion. They argued that the 2HT model can account for the critical effect if detection probabilities were determined by a memory-signal contrast between simultaneously presented stimuli. Here, we test this contrast mechanism directly. We show that when only a single old item is presented, such a contrast mechanism entails a decrease in the probability of correctly rejecting the accompanying new items as their number increases. SDT models, on the other hand, predict the opposite pattern. Results of an empirical investigation were in agreement with SDT and inconsistent with the 2HT contrast model. Thus, our findings strengthen the conclusions of Kellen and Klauer (2014) and provide further evidence for SDT models of recognition memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in working memory predict a wide range of cognitive abilities. However, little research has been done on whether working memory continues to predict task performance after repetitive learning. Here, we tested whether working memory ability continued to predict long-term memory (LTM) performance for picture sequences even after participants showed massive learning. In Experiments 1-3, subjects performed a source memory task in which they were presented a sequence of 30 objects shown in one of four quadrants and then were tested on each item's position. We repeated this procedure for five times in Experiment 1 and 12 times in Experiments 2 and 3. Interestingly, we discovered that individual differences in working memory continually predicted LTM accuracy across all repetitions. In Experiment 4, we replicated the stable working memory demands with word pairs. In Experiment 5, we generalized the stable working memory demands model to attentional control abilities. Together, these results suggest that people, instead of relying less on working memory, optimized their working memory and attentional control throughout learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Judgments of attractiveness have many important social outcomes, highlighting the need to understand how people form these judgments. One aspect of appearance that impacts perceptions of attractiveness is facial femininity/masculinity (sexual dimorphism). However, extant research has focused primarily on White, Western, heterosexual participants' preferences for femininity/masculinity in White faces, limiting generalizability. Indeed, recent research indicates that these preferences vary by culture, and other work finds differences between gay/lesbian and heterosexual individuals. Aspects of identity, such as culture and sexual orientation, do not exist in isolation from one another but rather intersect, leaving a critical gap in understanding. Our research therefore bridged across these hitherto separate areas of inquiry to provide a more comprehensive understanding of facial femininity/masculinity preferences. We tested how White British and East Asian Japanese individuals' culture and sexual orientation (including, crucially, bisexual individuals) predict their femininity/masculinity preferences for White and East Asian women's and men's faces, using two experimental tasks (forced-choice, interactive). Results show that individuals' culture and sexual orientation consistently interact to predict their preferences for femininity/masculinity in women's and men's faces, and we furthermore reveal bisexual individuals' preferences to differ from those of other sexual orientations. We also find differences between experimental tasks, with greater preferences for femininity emerging in the interactive task compared to the forced-choice task. Altogether, our findings highlight the importance of considering intersecting identities, consequences of methods of measurement, and shortcomings of extant explanations for preferences for facial femininity/masculinity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Predicting the location of moving objects in noisy environments is essential to everyday behavior, like when participating in traffic. Although many objects provide multisensory information, it remains unknown how humans use multisensory information to localize moving objects, and how this depends on expected sensory interference (e.g., occlusion). In four experiments, we systematically investigated localization for auditory, visual, and audiovisual targets (AV). Performance for audiovisual targets was compared to performance predicted by maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). In Experiment 1A, moving targets were occluded by an audiovisual occluder, and their final locations had to be inferred from target speed and occlusion duration. Participants relied exclusively on the visual component of the audiovisual target, even though the auditory component demonstrably provided useful location information when presented in isolation. In contrast, when a visual-only occluder was used in Experiment 1B, participants relied exclusively on the auditory component of the audiovisual target, even though the visual component demonstrably provided useful location information when presented in isolation. In Experiment 2, although localization estimates were in line with MLE predictions, no multisensory precision benefits were found when participants localized moving audiovisual target. In Experiment 3, a substantial multisensory benefit was found when participants localized static audiovisual target, showing near-MLE integration. In sum, observers use both hearing and vision when localizing static objects, but use only unisensory input when localizing moving objects and predicting motion under occlusion. Moreover, observers can flexibly prioritize one sense over the other, in anticipation of modality-specific interference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We developed a Metacognitive Offloading Optimization Task (MOOT) whereby participants were instructed to score as many points as possible by accessing words from a presented list either by remembering them (worth 10 points each) or by offloading them (worth less than 10 points each). Results indicated that participants were sensitive to the value of the offloaded items such that when offloaded items carried a high value (e.g., 8 points each), participants' scores were lower than if they had chosen to offload all items. Conversely, when offloaded items had a low value (e.g., 2 points each), participants' scores exceeded what they would have achieved had they offloaded all items. In Experiments 2 and 3, we investigated offloading optimality. Specifically, because each individual's maximum possible score depended on how much they could remember, each participant's memory ability was assessed in a pretest. The maximum score obtainable resulted from a strategy in which the participant opts to recall every item that they will be able to remember (obtaining 10 points for each) and offloads all other items (obtaining a value greater than 0 points for each), leaving no items unrecalled and not offloaded. To implement this strategy, the participant needs to have and use metaknowledge of exactly which items they will be able to recall. In each experiment, the MOOT scores-the ratio of participants' observed score to their maximum possible score-were closer to optimal for participants with better memory ability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

While prediction errors (PEs) have long been recognized as critical in associative learning, emerging evidence indicates their significant role in episodic memory formation. This series of four experiments sought to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the enhancing effects of PEs related to aversive events on memory for surrounding neutral events. Specifically, we aimed to determine whether these PE effects are specific to predictive stimuli preceding the PE or if PEs create a transient window of enhanced, unselective memory formation. In a combined incidental encoding-fear learning task, participants (n = 355) estimated aversive shock probabilities after trial-unique stimuli. Physiological arousal and explicit PEs were measured during encoding to predict recognition memory tested either immediately after encoding (Experiment 3) or 24 hr later (Experiments 1-4). Our results show that the retroactive memory enhancement induced by PEs may extend back longer than previously assumed, impacting stimuli presented 10 s before the PE. Furthermore, PE-driven memory enhancement extends beyond predictive stimuli preceding the PE event to those encountered afterward. Importantly, our findings reveal that PE-related memory enhancement for stimuli preceding the PE event is specific to predictive stimuli, with uninformative stimuli not benefiting from PEs and even interfering with the PE-driven memory enhancement. This pattern demonstrates that PE effects are not unspecific but that PEs enhance memory for predictive stimuli encountered around a PE event. Notably, memory-enhancing effects of PEs persisted even when controlling for changes in arousal. These findings provide insights into the cognitive mechanisms of PE-induced enhancements of memory, with potential implications for understanding aberrant emotional memory in fear-related disorders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Deciphering whether and which mental processes are accessible for metacognitive judgments is a key question to understand higher cognitive functions. Paralleling the crucial role of reaction times (RT) for unraveling the temporal sequence of mental processes, a comparable chronometric approach can be employed at the second-order level through introspective reaction times (iRT) measures. Although mean iRT correlate with mean RT, suggesting good metacognitive abilities, this would not necessarily imply a direct readout of the duration of the underlying processes as participants may instead rely on inferences based on other salient, nontemporal, cues. In the present study, two experiments investigated information at the basis of iRT. In visual choice reaction time tasks, participants were asked to report their RT on a visual analog scale after each trial. Thanks to linear regression analyses, we could evidence that trial-by-trial RT and iRT were strongly correlated, indicating a good readout of RT duration, but also that subjective evaluation was systematically biased by some experimental conditions. In addition, with electromyographic recordings, each single trial RT could be fractionated into premotor and motor times, allowing to investigate the relative contribution of each subprocess to iRT. This revealed that participants access both decision and motor execution durations. Results show that participants can access the duration of their mental processes but that this readout can be biased by nontemporal cues. The proposed methodology allows to dissociate the two. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).