Psychonomic Bulletin & Review最新文献

As social entities, individuals' perception and behaviors are susceptible to the influence of their social groups. Previous research has consistently shown that the group context in which individuals are situated significantly influences their perceptual processing. We aim to investigate whether the group context in which another individual is situated alters our understanding of their visual perception, which holds profound implications for interpersonal interactions. To address this inquiry, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a visual scene depicting multiple avatars seated around a table, all facing an arrow positioned at the center of the table. They were instructed to adopt the visual perspective of a specific avatar within the group to perceive the arrow's orientation, and then reproduce its orientation from their own perspectives. We found that participants exhibited a bias towards the group's average perspective when reproducing the arrow's orientation. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that reinforced group processing could elicit an earlier appearance of this bias. In Experiment 3, we investigated an alternative explanation positing that the aforementioned bias originated from visual ensemble perception rather than group influence by instructing participants to reproduce the target avatar's position relative to the arrow's orientation. If the bias indeed originated from ensemble perception, it should also manifest in this task. However, the absence of any reproduction bias refuted this possibility. Through these experiments, we demonstrate that our understanding of an individual's perceptual experiences is influenced by the social context in which they are situated, which manifests as a convergence phenomenon.

The diversity of contexts in which a word occurs, operationalized as CD, is strongly correlated with response times in visual word recognition, with higher CD words being recognized faster. CD and token word frequency (WF) are highly correlated but in behavioral studies when other variables that affect word visual recognition are controlled for, the WF effect is eliminated when contextual diversity (CD) is controlled. In contrast, the only event-related potential (ERP) study to examine CD and WF Vergara-Martínez et al., Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 17, 461-474, (2017) found effects of both WF and CD with different distributions in the 225- to 325-ms time window. We conducted an ERP study with Chinese characters to explore the neurocognitive dynamics of WF and CD. We compared three groups of characters: (1) characters high in frequency and low in CD; (2) characters low in frequency and low in CD; and (3) characters high in frequency and high in CD. Behavioral data showed significant effects of CD but not WF. Character CD, but not character frequency, modulated the late positive component (LPC): high-CD characters elicited a larger LPC, widely distributed, with largest amplitude at the posterior sites compared to low-CD characters in the 400-to 600-ms time window, consistent with earlier ERP studies of WF in Chinese, and with the hypothesis that CD affects semantic and context-based processes. No WF effect on any ERP components was observed when CD was controlled. The results are consistent with behavioral results showing CD but not WF effects, and in particular with a "context constructionist" framework.

The AHA experience, a moment of deep understanding during insightful problem-solving involving feelings of certainty, pleasure, and surprise, has captivated psychologists for more than a century. Recently, a new theoretical framework has proposed a link between the AHA experience and prediction error (PE), a popular concept in decision-making and reinforcement learning. This framework suggests that participants maintain a meta-cognitive prediction about the time it takes to solve a problem and the AHA experience arises when the problem is solved earlier than expected, resulting in a meta-cognitive PE. In our preregistered online study, we delved deeper into this idea, investigating whether prediction errors also pertain to participants' predictions regarding the solvability of the problem itself, and which dimension of the AHA experience aligns with the meta-cognitive PE. Utilizing verbal insight problems, we found a positive association between the AHA experience and the meta-cognitive PE, specifically in regards to problem solvability. Specifically, the element of surprise, a critical AHA dimension, emerged as a key indicator of the meta-cognitive PE, while other dimensions-such as pleasure, certainty, and suddenness-showed no signs for similar relationships, with suddenness exhibiting a negative correlation with meta-cognitive PE. This new finding provides further evidence that aspects of the AHA experience, surprise in particular, correspond to a meta-cognitive PE. The finding also underscores the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon, linking insights with learning theories and enhancing our understanding of this intriguing phenomenon.

In this paper, we investigate, by means of a computational model, how individuals map quantifiers onto numbers and how they order quantifiers on a mental line. We selected five English quantifiers (few, fewer than half, many, more than half, and most) which differ in truth conditions and vagueness. We collected binary truth value judgment data in an online quantifier verification experiment. Using a Bayesian three-parameter logistic regression model, we separated three sources of individual differences: truth condition, vagueness, and response error. Clustering on one of the model's parameter that corresponds to truth conditions revealed four subgroups of participants with different quantifier-to-number mappings and different ranges of the mental line of quantifiers. Our findings suggest multiple sources of individual differences in semantic representations of quantifiers and support a conceptual distinction between different types of imprecision in quantifier meanings. We discuss the consequence of our findings for the main theoretical approaches to quantifiers: the bivalent truth-conditional approach and the fuzzy logic approach. We argue that the former approach neither can explain inter-individual differences nor intra-individual differences in truth conditions of vague quantifiers. The latter approach requires further specification to fully account for individual differences demonstrated in this study.

Research findings indicate that when a task-irrelevant stimulus feature deviates from an otherwise predictable pattern, participants performing a categorization task exhibit slower responses (deviance distraction). This deviance distraction effect reflects the violation of the sensory predictions generated by the cognitive system. In this study, we sought to examine for the first time whether these predictions can be incidentally modulated by the auditory environment. Participants categorized the duration (short vs long) of a colored shape (red square or blue circle) while instructed to disregard the stimulus' visual features and the sound played in the background (two distinct chords played by different instruments). While the two visual stimuli shapes were equiprobable across the task, one was highly likely (p=.882) and the other rare (p=.118) in one auditory context and vice versa in the other context. Our results showed that participants were significantly slower in the duration judgement task whenever the stimulus was unexpected within a given auditory context (context-dependent distraction), and that the reset of their sensory predictions was completed upon the trial following a change of context. We conclude that object features and environmental context are processed in relation to each other and that sensory predictions are produced in relation to the environmental context, evidencing the first demonstration of auditory context-dependent modulation of attention.

Nicotine produces robust stimulus effects that can be conditioned to form associations with reinforcing nondrug stimuli. We examine how established associations to the nicotine stimulus may be weakened via the overexpectation effect. In two experiments, we separately conditioned sucrose associations to the interoceptive nicotine stimulus (0.4 mg/kg, SC) and to a "noisy" exteroceptive contextual stimulus (oscillating houselight and white noise) via the discriminated goal-tracking task. Thereafter, we presented additional sucrose pairings with the nicotine and noisy stimuli, now in compound. Testing of the conditioned goal-tracking evoked by the nicotine and noisy stimuli in isolation-before versus after compound conditioning (Experiment 1) or between treatment and control groups (Experiment 2)-demonstrated an attenuation of conditioned responding via the overexpectation effect. We suggest that applications of the overexpectation effect may provide some promise for treatments seeking to attenuate drug-evoked conditioned responses in situations where extinction-based interventions are not suitable.

Working memory is known to be capacity-limited and is therefore selective not only for what it encodes but also what it forgets. Explicit forgetting cues can be used effectively to free up capacity, but it is not clear how working memory adaptively forgets in the absence of explicit cues. An important implicit cue that may tune forgetting in working memory is the passage of time. When information becomes irrelevant more quickly, working memory should also forget information more quickly. In three delayed-estimation experiments, we systematically manipulated how probing probability changed as time passed on after encoding an item (i.e., the "probing hazard"). In some blocks, probing hazard decreased after encoding an item, requiring participants to only briefly retain the memory item. In other blocks, the probing hazard increased or stayed flat, as the retention interval was lengthened. In line with our hypothesis, we found that participants adapted their forgetting rate to the probing dynamics of the working memory task. When the memory item quickly became irrelevant ("decreasing" probing hazard), forgetting rate was higher than in blocks where probing hazard increased or stayed flat. The time course of these adaptations in forgetting implies a fast and flexible mechanism. Interestingly, participants could not explicitly report the order of conditions, suggesting forgetting is implicitly sped up. These findings suggest that implicit adaptations to the temporal structure of our environment tune forgetting speed in working memory, possibly contributing to the flexible allocation of limited working memory resources.

Racial stereotypes are commonly activated by informational cues that are detectable in people's faces. Here, we used a sequential priming task to examine whether and how the salience of emotion (angry/scowling vs. happy/smiling expressions) or apparent race (Black vs. White) information in male face primes shapes racially biased weapon identification (gun vs. tool) decisions. In two experiments (N_total = 546) using two different manipulations of facial information salience, racial bias in weapon identification was weaker when the salience of emotion expression versus race was heightened. Using diffusion decision modeling, we tested competing accounts of the cognitive mechanism by which the salience of facial information moderates this behavioral effect. Consistent support emerged for an initial bias account, whereby the decision process began closer to the "gun" response upon seeing faces of Black versus White men, and this racially biased shift in the starting position was weaker when emotion versus race information was salient. We discuss these results vis-à-vis prior empirical and theoretical work on how facial information salience moderates racial bias in decision-making.

The Stroop interference effect-the slower response to color in an incongruent Stroop stimulus (e.g., ) relative to a neutral Stroop stimulus (e.g., ) is usually highly robust. The present study investigated the role of selective attention in the Stroop task by priming the distractor word. Replicating previous studies using the verbal (color-naming) task, priming the distractor word produced a substantial speedup of response to the color in a Stroop stimulus in our manual Stroop task. Importantly, priming the distractor completely eliminated the Stroop interference effect (Incongruent = Neutral, e.g., ), and brought about a sizable facilitation effect (Congruent < Neutral, e.g., ) that was absent in the standard (control-primed) Stroop trials. RT distribution analysis showed that the pattern of facilitation and interference effects was changed radically by priming the distractor: In the standard Stroop task, the Stroop interference effect increased across quantiles, and the facilitation effect was absent throughout the quantiles; in contrast, in the distractor-primed Stroop task, the interference effect was eliminated, and the large facilitation effect that emerged remained constant across the quantiles. We interpret these results in terms of a "Trojan horse" account that suggests that in a Stroop stimulus, color and word form are integrated into an object; hence, when object-based attention is deployed to attend to the color, the word form "sneaks in." Priming the distractor breaks this integration, allowing attention to disengage from the irrelevant word dimension and eliminating Stroop interference.

We develop alternative families of Bayes factors for use in hypothesis tests as alternatives to the popular default Bayes factors. The alternative Bayes factors are derived for the statistical analyses most commonly used in psychological research - one-sample and two-sample t tests, regression, and ANOVA analyses. They possess the same desirable theoretical and practical properties as the default Bayes factors and satisfy additional theoretical desiderata while mitigating against two features of the default priors that we consider implausible. They can be conveniently computed via an R package that we provide. Furthermore, hypothesis tests based on Bayes factors and those based on significance tests are juxtaposed. This discussion leads to the insight that default Bayes factors as well as the alternative Bayes factors are equivalent to test-statistic-based Bayes factors as proposed by Johnson. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 67, 689-701. (2005). We highlight test-statistic-based Bayes factors as a general approach to Bayes-factor computation that is applicable to many hypothesis-testing problems for which an effect-size measure has been proposed and for which test power can be computed.