Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

When performing tasks in a social context, individuals tend to report confidence judgments that increasingly align with those of others over time. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, termed confidence matching, are not fully understood. This study explores two potential drivers of confidence matching behavior: informational factors that cause individuals to genuinely recalibrate their private sense of confidence based on their partner's confidence; and normative factors that lead individuals to adapt the way in which they publicly express their confidence, without changing their private assessment of their own performance. To examine these influences, we conducted two experiments examining the effects of both informational and normative factors on private and public confidence. The results demonstrate that both factors can lead to confidence matching. In a setting devoid of feedback, participants matched their confidence reports with their partner's and modified their information-seeking behavior-a proxy for private confidence-accordingly, pointing toward the role of informational factors. Conversely, in a scenario in which feedback was readily available and a joint decision-making rule was enforced, participants aligned their confidence reports with their partner's but did not adjust their information-seeking behavior, hinting at normative factors influencing the public display of confidence matching. These findings highlight the flexibility and context-sensitivity of confidence, thereby underscoring the importance of factoring in social contexts and the adaptive nature of confidence when studying metacognitive processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding social events requires assigning the participating entities to roles such as agent and patient, a mental operation that is reportedly effortless. We investigated whether, in processing visual scenes, role assignment is accomplished automatically (i.e., when the task does not require it), based on visuospatial information, without requiring semantic or linguistic encoding of the stimuli. Human adults saw a series of images featuring the same male and female actors next to each other, one in an agentlike (more dynamic/leaning forward) and the other in a patientlike (static/less dynamic) posture. Participants indicated the side (left/right) of a target actor (i.e., the woman). From trial to trial, body postures changed, but the roles, defined by the type of posture, sometimes changed, sometimes not. We predicted that if participants spontaneously saw the actors as agent and patient, they should be slower to respond when roles switched from trial n-1 to trial n, than when they stayed the same (role switch cost). Results confirmed this hypothesis (Experiments 1-3). A role switch cost was also found when roles were defined by another visual relational cue, the relative positioning (where one actor stands relative to another), but not when actors were presented in isolation (Experiments 4-6). These findings reveal a mechanism for automatic role assignment based on encoding of visual relational information in social (multiple-person) scenes. Since we found that roles in one trial affected the processing of the subsequent trial despite variations in postures and spatial relations, this mechanism must be one that assigns entities in a scene, to the abstract categories of agent and patient. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Subjective confidence is an important factor in our decision making, but how confidence arises is a matter of debate. A number of computational models have been proposed that integrate confidence into sequential sampling models of decision making, in which evidence accumulates across time to a threshold. An influential example of this approach is the relative balance of evidence hypothesis, in which confidence is determined by the amount of evidence for the choice that was made compared to the evidence for all possible choices. Here, we modify this approach by mapping distance from a decision threshold to confidence via a sigmoid function. This allows for individual differences in bias toward lower or higher levels of confidence, as well as sensitivity to differences in evidence between choices. We apply several variants of the model to assess potential age differences between young and older adults in source memory decision making in an existing data set (Dodson, Bawa, & Slotnick, 2007). We compare our model to the relative balance of evidence approach, and the results indicate that the sigmoidal method substantially improves model fit. We also consider models in which memory errors can arise from a misrecollection process that involves associating items with the incorrect source, a process that has been proposed to account for age differences in source memory confidence and accuracy, but find no evidence that misrecollection is necessary to account for the results. This work provides a viable model of subjective confidence that is integrated with well-established models of decision making and provides insights into effects of aging on source memory decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in the dynamics of attention control were examined in two studies. Participants performed mouse tracker versions of Stroop (Studies 1 and 2) and flankers (Study 2), along with additional measures of attention control and working memory to better examine individual differences in how conflict resolution processes unfold over time. Attention control abilities were related to the amount of attraction to the incorrect response and the time to move toward the correct response on incongruent trials in the Stroop task. In the flanker task, attention control abilities were not related to the amount of attraction to the incorrect response but were related to the time to move toward the correct response on incongruent trials. Mouse tracker measures in both Stroop and flankers demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties and tended to load moderately on an attention control factor along with other attention control tasks. These results are consistent with the notion that conflict resolution processes in Stroop and flankers likely reflect both overlapping and distinct (i.e., restraining and constraining attention) processes that are related to broader attention control abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Experience is known to be a key element involved in the modulation of face-processing abilities as manifested by the inversion effect, other-race, and other-age effects. Yet, it is unclear how exposure refines internal perceptual representations of faces to give rise to such behavioral effects. To address this issue, we investigated short- and long-term experienced stimulus history on face processing. Participants performed same-different judgments in a serial discrimination task where two consecutive faces were drawn from a distribution of morphed faces. The use of stimulus statistics was measured by testing the gravitation of representations toward the experienced mean (regression-to-the-mean), and the dynamic of the biases was tested by investigating trial-by-trial performance. Own-race and own-age faces were tested alongside other-race and other-age faces employing a within-subject design. Results demonstrated greater regression biases in other-race and other-age faces than in own-race and own-age faces. Perceptual narrowing, measured by the ability to form and use the representation of the overall mean of the nonnative faces, varied with proficiency levels, with only those with low proficiency in face recognition showing the use of overall stimulus history for other-race faces. In contrast, the use of stimulus history for other-age faces was similarly affected by statistics in the low- and high-proficiency groups. The results demonstrate that narrowing is associated with specialization levels occurring more robustly for other-race faces, for which exposure is limited during sensitive periods in development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here, we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: In contrast to the prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4) and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Metacognition provides control and oversight to the process of acquiring and using knowledge. Efficient metacognition is essential to many aspects of daily life, from health care to finance and education. Across three experiments, we found a specific form of curiosity in humans about the quality of their own metacognition, using a novel approach that dissociates perceptual from metacognitive information searches. Observers displayed a strategic balance in their curiosity, alternating between a focus on perceptual accuracy and metacognitive performance. Depending on the context, this metacognitive curiosity was modulated by an internal evaluation of metacognition, leading to increased feedback requests when metacognition was likely to be inaccurate. Using an ideal observer model, we describe how this curiosity trade-off can arise naturally from a recursive evaluation and transformation of decisions' evidence. These results show that individuals are inherently curious about their metacognitive abilities and can compare perceptual and metacognitive precision to fine-tune performance monitoring. We propose that this form of curiosity may reflect humans' drive to refine their self-model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How does race influence the impressions we form through direct interaction? In two preregistered experiments (N = 239/179), White American participants played a money-sharing game with Black and White players, based on a probabilistic reward reinforcement learning task, in which they chose to interact with players and received feedback on whether a player shared. We found that participants formed stronger reward preferences for White relative to Black players despite equivalent reward feedback between groups-a pattern that was stronger among participants with low internal motivation to respond without prejudice and high explicit prejudice. This race effect in reward learning was evident in participants' behavioral choice preferences, but not in their self-reported perceptions of group members' reward rates. Computational modeling suggested two mechanisms through which race affected instrumental learning: race (a) influenced White participants' initial expectancies (i.e., priors) about Black compared with White players' behavior and (b) led participants to update reward representations of Black and White players according to separate learning rates. These findings demonstrate that race can influence the formation of impressions through direct social interaction and introduce an instrumental learning framework to understand the effects of bias in intergroup interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of emotion on memory are wide-ranging and powerful, but they are not uniform. Although there is agreement that emotion enhances memory for individual items, how it influences memory for the associated contextual details (relational memory, RM) remains debated. The prevalent view suggests that emotion impairs RM, but there is also evidence that emotion enhances RM. To reconcile these diverging results, we carried out three studies incorporating the following features: (1) testing RM with increased specificity, distinguishing between subjective (recollection based) and objective (item-context match) RM accuracy, (2) accounting for emotion-attention interactions via eye-tracking and task manipulation, and (3) using stimuli with integrated item-context content. Challenging the prevalent view, we identified both enhancing and impairing effects. First, emotion enhanced subjective RM, separately and when confirmed by accurate objective RM. Second, emotion impaired objective RM through attention capturing, but it enhanced RM accuracy when attentional effects were statistically accounted for using eye-tracking data. Third, emotion also enhanced RM when participants were cued to focus on contextual details during encoding, likely by increasing item-context binding. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded from a subset of participants showed that emotional enhancement of RM was associated with increased activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, along with increased intra-MTL and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex-MTL functional connectivity. Overall, these findings reconcile evidence regarding opposing effects of emotion on RM and point to possible training interventions to increase RM specificity in healthy functioning, posttraumatic stress disorder, and aging, by promoting item-context binding and diminishing memory decontextualization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The U-shaped curve has long been recognized as a fundamental concept in psychological science, particularly in theories about motivational accounts and cognitive control. In this study (N = 330), we empirically tested the prediction of a nonmonotonic, curvilinear relationship between task difficulty and control adaptation. Drawing from motivational intensity theory and the expected value of control framework, we hypothesized that control intensity would increase with task difficulty until a maximum tolerable level, after which it would decrease. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments utilizing Stroop-like conflict tasks, systematically manipulating the number of distractors to vary task difficulty. We assessed control adaptation and measured subjective task difficulty. Our results revealed a curvilinear pattern between perceived task difficulty and adaptation of control. The findings provide empirical support for the theoretical accounts of motivational intensity theory and expected value of control, highlighting the nonlinear nature of the relationship between task difficulty and cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).