Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

When reproducing the remembered location of dots within a circle, judgments are biased toward the center of imaginary quadrants formed by imaginary vertical and horizontal axes. This effect may result from the heightened precision in the visual system for these orientations in a retinotopic reference frame, or alternately on the internal representation of gravity. We dissociated reference frames defined by the retina and by gravity by having participants locate dots from memory in a circle when their head was upright (aligned with gravity) versus tilted 30° to the left (misaligned with gravity). We mapped the structure of spatial prototypes in a data-driven way using a novel "imaging" procedure. We calculated the rotation of the prototype maps which maximized the similarity between postures, letting us quantify the contribution of each reference frame. Spatial categories are determined by a combination of reference frames, with clear contributions from both gravitational and retinal factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The understanding of eating disorders is hindered by the lack of integration between existing psychosocial and neurobiological approaches. We address this problem by developing a novel transdiagnostic and computational approach to eating restriction decisions. We first validated a novel paradigm which extends an established monetary risk task to involve body stimuli with psychosocial values. We used advanced behavioral data analysis of a large (total N = 539) sample of women from across the eating restraint spectrum, including those with anorexia nervosa (AN; n = 31), recovered from AN (n = 23), and subclinical women with varying levels of eating restraint (n = 485), obtained from an online experiment, public event, and laboratory-based study. We found that social and motivational values regarding body appearance have a significant effect on value-based, decision making in eating restriction. Subsequently, validated descriptive and predictive advanced computational modeling indicated that these behaviors are driven by an aversion to risk rather than loss, with desirable body outcomes being associated with less risk aversion, and undesirable body outcomes linked to greater risk aversion. These findings indicate that cognitive and social factors influence eating decisions by distinct mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Relationship closeness determines the propensity to spontaneously reproduce another's emotional and physiological stress response. We investigated whether psychosocial stress in mothers is causally linked to such empathic stress in children. Mothers (N = 76) completed either a standardized laboratory stressor or a stress-free control task, while their middle childhood-aged children (8-12 years old) were watching. Mother-child dyads simultaneously provided multiple cortisol, heart-rate, high-frequency heart-rate variability (HF-HRV), and subjective stress samples. We found that stress-group children had a greater propensity to show physiologically significant cortisol release, especially boys. Watching stressed mothers also triggered stronger subjective, state empathy, and HF-HRV stress responses, with the latter relying on elevated trait cognitive empathy ratings. Only in the stressed dyads, children's HF-HRV resonated with those of their mothers'. We conclude that young children, although only mildly stressed, spontaneously reproduce maternal stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Our memories of other people shape how we interact with them. Yet, even when we forget exactly what others said or did, we often remember impressions that capture a general gist of their behavior-whether they were forthright, friendly, or funny. Drawing on fuzzy trace theory, we propose two modes of social impression formation: impressions formed based on ordinal gist ("more competent," "less competent") or categorical gist ("competent," "incompetent"). In turn, we propose that people gravitate toward the simplest representation available and that different modes of memory have distinct consequences for social decisions. Specifically, ordinal impressions lead people to make decisions based on an individual's standing relative to others, whereas categorical impressions lead people to make decisions based on discrete classifications that interpret behavior. In four experiments, participants learned about two groups of individuals who differed in their competence (Studies 1a, 2, and 3) or generosity (Study 1b). When participants encoded impressions as ordinal rankings, they preferred to hire or help a relatively good target from a low-performing group over a relatively bad target from a high-performing group, even though both targets behaved identically and accuracy was incentivized. However, when participants could use categorical boundaries to interpret behavior, this preference was eliminated. In a final experiment, changing the category participants used to encode others' generosity changed their impressions, even when accounting for memory for verbatim details. This work links social impressions to theories of mental representation in memory and judgment, highlighting how distinct representations support divergent patterns of social decision-making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A methodological problem in most reaction time (RT) tasks is that some measured RTs may be outliers, being either too fast or too slow to reflect the task-related processing of interest. Numerous ad hoc procedures have been used to identify these outliers for exclusion from further analyses, but the accuracies of these methods have not been systematically compared. The present study compared the performance of 58 different outlier exclusion procedures (OEPs) using four huge datasets of real RTs. The results suggest that these OEPs are likely to do more harm than good, because they incorrectly identify outliers, increase noise, introduce bias, and generally reduce statistical power. The results suggest that RT researchers should not automatically apply any of these OEPs to clean their RT data prior to the main analyses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Bilingualism has been shown to modify infants' responses in a range of domains. In particular, early bilingual experience is associated with greater flexibility and openness in infant perception and learning. In this study, we investigated whether bilingual infants demonstrate more fundamental differences in how they explore their environment in ways that could contribute to greater openness. Specifically, we investigated whether bilingual infants orient more rapidly to new information. Capitalizing on a classic paradigm by Fantz (1964), monolingual and bilingual infants (5-6 months and 8-9 months) were simultaneously presented with familiar and novel stimuli. As they received increased exposure to the familiar and novel stimuli, monolingual infants demonstrated a null preference, followed by a novelty preference, as previously evidenced in Fantz's study. In contrast, an orientation toward novelty emerged more readily in bilingual infants. Characteristics of a bilingual environment that may modulate the allocation of attention toward novelty are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Familiar words come with a wealth of associated knowledge about their variety of usage, accumulated over a lifetime. How do we track and adjust this knowledge as new instances of a word are encountered? A recent study (Cognition) found that, for homonyms (e.g., bank), sleep-associated consolidation facilitates the updating of meaning dominance. Here, we tested the generality of this finding by exposing participants to (Experiment 1; N = 125) nonhomonyms (e.g., bathtub) in sentences that biased their meanings toward a specific interpretation (e.g., bathtub-slip vs. bathtub-relax), and (Experiment 2; N = 128) word-class ambiguous words (e.g., loan) in sentences where the words were used in their dispreferred word class (e.g., "He will loan me money"). Both experiments showed that such sentential experience influenced later interpretation and usage of the words more after a night's sleep than a day awake. We interpret these results as evidence for a general role of episodic memory in language comprehension such that new episodic memories are formed every time a sentence is comprehended, and these memories contribute to lexical processing next time the word is encountered, as well as potentially to the fine-tuning of long-term lexical knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Many of our most pressing challenges, from combating climate change to dealing with pandemics, are collective action problems: situations in which individual and collective interests conflict with each other. In such situations, people face a dilemma about making individually costly but collectively beneficial contributions to the common good. Understanding which factors influence people's willingness to make these contributions is vital for the design of policies and institutions that support the attainment of collective goals. In this study, we investigate how inequalities, and different causes of inequalities, impact individual-level behavior and group-level outcomes. First, we find that what people judged to be fair was not enough to solve the collective action problem: if they acted according to what they thought was fair, they would collectively fail. Second, the level of wealth (rich vs. poor) altered what was judged to be a fair contribution to the public good more than the cause of wealth (merit vs. luck vs. uncertain). Contributions during the game reflected these fairness judgments, with poorer individuals consistently contributing a higher proportion of their wealth than richer participants, which further increased inequality-particularly in successful groups. Finally, the cause of one's wealth was largely irrelevant, mattering most only when it was uncertain, as opposed to resulting from merit or luck. We discuss implications for policymakers and international climate change negotiations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The positivity of goal completion is reinforced through everyday experiences of social praise and instrumental reward. Here we investigated whether, in line with this self-regulatory emphasis, people value completion opportunities in and of themselves. Across six experiments we found that adding an arbitrary completion opportunity to a lower-reward task increased the likelihood that participants would choose to work on that task over a higher-reward alternative that did not offer a completion opportunity. This occurred for extrinsic reward tradeoffs (Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 5) and intrinsic reward tradeoffs (Experiments 2 and 6), and it persisted even when participants explicitly noted the rewards of each task (Experiment 3). We sought but did not find evidence that the tendency is moderated by participants' stable or momentary level of concern with monitoring multiple responsibilities (Experiments 4 and 5, respectively). We did find that the opportunity to complete the final step in a sequence was particularly attractive: Setting the lower-reward task closer to completion (but with completion still out of reach) did increase its choice share, but setting the lower-reward task with completion distinctly in reach increased its choice share even more (Experiment 6). Together, the experiments imply that people sometimes behave as if they value completion itself. In everyday life, the allure of mere completion may influence the tradeoffs people make when prioritizing their goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How people set decision criteria in signal detection model is an important research question. The likelihood ratio (LR) theory, which is one of the most influential theories about criteria setting, typically assumes that (a) decisions are based on the objective LR of the signal and noise distributions, and (b) LR criteria do not change across tasks with various difficulty levels. However, it is often questioned whether people are really able to know the exact shape of signal and noise distributions, and compute the objective LR accordingly. Here we suggest whether decision criteria are set based on objective LR can be tested in two-condition experiments with different difficulty levels across conditions. We then asked participants in three empirical experiments to perform two-condition perceptual or memory tasks, and give their answer using confidence rating scale. Results revealed that the two assumptions of LR theory contradicted with each other: if we assumed decision criteria were based on objective LR, then the estimated LR criteria differed across difficulty levels, and fanned out as task difficulty decreased. We suggest people might inaccurately estimate the LR in signal detection tasks, and several possible explanations for the distortion of LR are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).