Psychonomic Bulletin & Review最新文献

Racially biased weapon identification, wherein guns are identified more easily after seeing Black (vs. White) face primes, is a robust and replicable phenomenon. Mounting evidence suggests that introducing additional facial information (e.g., varying age cues) does not meaningfully alter this racial bias. Only when augmenting its relative salience does the additional, nonrace information appear to mitigate racially biased weapon identification. Even when reducing racial bias by enhancing nonrace facial cues, social information is typically communicated via the face, a context in which race may be particularly salient. Two experiments (N_total = 590 participants) using a sequential priming task tested whether broadening the contextual information in primes to include both faces and bodies moderates racially biased weapon identification (gun vs. tool) decisions. Replicating past findings, racial bias was evident when primes cued age and race via facial information only. However, this behavioral effect disappeared when primes included both faces and bodies, providing richer social context. Diffusion decision modeling revealed that race cues shifted the starting point of the decision-making process toward stereotype-consistent responses (e.g., "gun" after Black primes) with face-only primes, but this processing bias disappeared with face-and-body primes. Multinomial processing tree modeling further revealed attenuated attention to race in face-and-body (vs. face-only) primes, whereas attention to age remained intact across conditions. These findings advance theory on the operation of racially biased decision making in richer social contexts.

Daily planning and goal-directed behavior rely on accurate judgments of the duration of past experience. However, retrospective duration judgments are often inaccurate. At the same time, our memory of these experiences transforms over time, with memory forgetting being a common occurrence. In this case, whether and how changes in episodic memory impact duration judgments? Here, participants watched videos depicting daily events with clear boundaries segmenting each subevent. Participants then completed recall and duration judgment tasks both immediately and after 7 days. For whole events, results showed that the recall of the event structure, specifically the number of subevents, significantly influenced immediate and delayed duration judgments. In contrast, event content memories, including gist and recalled details, had no major impact on the entire event duration. In contrast, duration judgments of individual subevents depend on the recall of event content, with immediate judgments linked to recalled gist accuracy and detail richness, while delayed judgments tend to average out, with no significant effect from change in recalled details. Together, these results suggest that retrospective duration judgments rely on explicit episodic memory recall, with the type of recall varying depending on the size and complexity of the naturalistic event. While the segmented structure provides a consistent basis for duration judgments of complex events, single subevents without internal boundaries rely more on granular details.

This study investigated auditory-conceptual associations in children using complex audiovisual stimuli, namely musical excerpts from the Western classical repertoire and drawings. In Experiment 1, we examined whether 6- to 9-year old children were able to consistently match musical excerpts from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf with corresponding black-and-white images of the characters. The results confirmed robust associations, particularly for the bird, wolf and duck, while other pairings were more variable. In Experiment 2, we extended this approach by using the musical suite Saint Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, testing whether timbre influences children's audiovisual associations. Children were presented with colour images of animals alongside orchestral or piano versions of the musical excerpts that the composer associated with the animal. The results revealed that, in line with a similar study conducted recently in adults (Di Stefano et al., 2025), participants made significantly above-chance associations for the characters of the lion and the swan. However, unlike in adults, timbre had no significant effect on children's audiovisual pairings. These findings highlight the robustness of auditory-semantic associations presented through audiovisual stimuli in childhood, supporting the idea that certain audiovisual correspondences are developmentally stable, while showing that subtle nuances (i.e., differences in timbre) might emerge later on during development.

Subtle linguistic differences can shape beliefs about the social world. For example, the statement "Girls are just as good as boys at math" leads some people to endorse the stereotype that boys have more natural math skill compared with a statement with the positions of the groups reversed. Traditional accounts of linguistic framing characterize such effects as an irrational consequence of biased cognitive and emotional processes. In contrast, we hypothesized that framing effects of this sort depend on the ability to pick up on the pragmatic implications of subject-complement syntax, where the group framed as the complement ("boys") is the implied standard or reference point. We investigated this possibility in two preregistered experiments (N = 1,593). Overall, participants who were better at inferring implicatures from subject-complement syntax were more likely to exhibit a framing effect by endorsing the implicature after reading subject-complement statements about math ability. This relationship held even when the statements referenced non-stereotyped groups and when controlling for other social-cognitive abilities associated with pragmatic competence. Framing effects were reduced for participants who explicitly recognized the statements as influencing their evaluations, but only when they invoked a stereotype to be discounted. These results suggest that pragmatic inference plays a crucial role in subject-complement framing but that people do not necessarily accede to what they infer. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that many framing effects-far from being irrational-are a natural product of human communication.

Impaired sensorimotor synchronization is observed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet the underlying mechanism of this impairment remains unclear. The current study investigated the impact of the inter-stimulus interval and the modality of stimulus on synchronization performance in children with ASD. Twenty-one high-functioning children with ASD and 21 typically developing (TD) children participated in a finger-tapping task. There were no significant group differences in age, gender, or IQ. Results showed that children with ASD exhibited greater asynchrony at longer time intervals and lower efficiency in multisensory integration compared to TD children. Notably, children with ASD were able to benefit from multisensory cues to improve their sensorimotor synchronization at longer intervals. Children's synchronization performance was correlated with total IQ, fluid reasoning, and visual spatial ability. These findings shed light on the underlying mechanism of atypical synchronization in children with ASD and provide a new avenue for developing targeted training on sensorimotor synchronization for children with ASD.

Despite the early development of children's sensitivity to the informativeness of testimony, there is limited understanding of their interpretation of others' history of informativeness. This study investigates how preschoolers make trait inferences and pragmatic inferences about informants who differed in informativeness, and how these abilities affect their selective learning. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 64) observed two informants with differential access to a series of conjunctive causal events (full vs. partial). They were then asked to make pragmatic and trait inferences about the informants before choosing one informant to learn from. Five-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, preferred to learn from the informative speaker. This pattern of selective learning held only for children who evaluated the informative speaker as smarter and for those children who could infer the informants' epistemic states from the strength of statements. These findings highlight the crucial role of trait reasoning and pragmatic ability in guiding children's selective learning.

Numerous studies adopting Posner peripheral cueing paradigms have shown that exogenous attentional orientation (EAO) to a salient-but-irrelevant stimulus involves two opposing attentional processes: early attentional capture and late attentional suppression. Recent evidence has indicated that long-term perceptual learning can induce involuntary attentional capture by nonsalient shapes. However, it remains unclear whether a well-trained nonsalient shape could exhibit a biphasic pattern of EAO similar to that observed with physically salient stimuli, including both an early exogenous attentional shift and a late inhibition of return (IOR). Through both a perceptual learning task and a classic peripheral cueing task, the current study showed that a well-trained nonsalient shape cue could exhibit a biphasic pattern of EAO. When compared with an untrained shape, a well-trained nonsalient shape facilitated subsequent target detection at short cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs, 200-300 ms) and deteriorated target detection at a relatively long CTOA (800 ms), but not at 400- to 600-ms CTOAs. As a comparison, a detectability-matched onset cue or luminance contrast cue elicited a facilitatory effect at 200- to 300-ms CTOAs and an inhibitory effect starting from 400-ms CTOA. A control eye-tracking experiment suggested that the absence of IOR effects at 400- to 600-ms CTOAs in the trained cue task was not due to fewer eye movements during the task. Our results indicated that, as opposed to physically salient stimuli, a well-trained nonsalient shape induced delayed IOR after an evident exogenous shift of visual attention. The different patterns of EAO processes support the notion that prior experience (such as perceptual learning) plays a unique role in modulating our exogenous attention. Possible underlying mechanisms are proposed.

This study examined how task-irrelevant spatial and temporal relationships influence feature binding in visual working memory (VWM). Participants viewed two sequential memory displays, each containing two distinct objects. Objects were presented either simultaneously at different locations (thereby sharing temporal position) or sequentially at the same location (thereby sharing spatial position). On each trial, a test probe either matched one of the four memory items or combined features from two different items (non-match). Nonmatching probes were constructed to share spatial, temporal, or neither information with the original memory items. Feature misbinding occurred more frequently when the test probe shared either spatial or temporal attributes with the original items, with no significant difference in error rates between these two types. In Experiment 2, stimuli were presented either bilaterally or unilaterally to test whether spatial configuration influenced binding. While the bilateral condition replicated the findings from Experiment 1, the unilateral condition revealed greater misbinding for temporally overlapping items, suggesting that temporal information may take precedence over spatial information within the same hemifield. These findings demonstrate that the relative contribution of spatial and temporal information to feature binding in VWM is flexible.

Previous research has identified cultural differences in visual perception, where East Asians focus more on global object structure and display a larger breadth of attention compared with Westerners. East Asians rely on lower spatial frequencies (SFs) compared to Westerners for face recognition, which may be linked to this. Investigating whether such differences extend to other high-level stimulus categories would clarify if SF tuning differences reflect more general or face specific cognitive processes. The present study compared the SF tunings of Canadians and Chinese during object (Exp. 1; N = 50) and scene (Exp. 3; N = 47) categorization. In both experiments, results did not indicate a significant difference between groups. In Experiment 3 (N = 128), we conducted an online replication of Experiment 1 while measuring the SF tunings of the same participants during face perception. Again, no significant difference between the groups was found during object categorization, but the finding that East Asians rely on lower SF than Westerners was replicated. Together, these results suggest that unique mechanisms may underlie the cultural differences in face processing, though alternative explanations, such as the feature consistency of faces, could also account for these findings.

Written words presented within a sequence of words are identified more accurately when this sequence forms a correct sentence or phrase compared with an ungrammatical re-ordering of the same words. Here we examined if this sentence superiority effect (SSE) is modulated by the predictability of the target word given the sentence context. Target words were at positions 2 and 5 in five-word sequences, and either had high or low cloze probabilities (measured by an independent cloze test and further checked using the word-in-context probabilities obtained with a Large Language Model (LLM)). Given that predictability only made sense when considering grammatically correct sequences, we performed two separate analyses. We found: (1) an effect of grammaticality (i.e., we replicated the SSE), (2) a small effect of predictability on responses to grammatically correct sequences, and (3) no interaction between predictability and grammaticality. The impact of predictability on the SSE was then evaluated by comparing the magnitude of the SSE obtained with more predictable words versus less predictable words, with the SSE in each of these conditions being measured using identification accuracy for the same word at the same position in grammatical and ungrammatical sequences. Results revealed no significant modulation of the SSE by word predictability. We conclude that syntactic and semantic constraints, and not predictability per se (as measured by a cloze test or LLM statistics), contribute to the sentence superiority effect. Crucially, this provides evidence against guessing accounts of the SSE according to which predictability should play a key role.