Psychonomic Bulletin & Review最新文献

Repeated exposure to an object is a common experience in everyday life and behavioral experiments. This study examined whether the memory representations of an object changed after repeated exposure and how such changes could later affect the recall of how many times the object occurred (i.e., frequency). Participants recalled the size of colored dots from short-term memory, and Experiment 1 found that the recalled sizes increased after repeated exposure. Experiments 2a-c found that the increase dissipated with variations in the dots' presentations (i.e., variable positions and backgrounds) and persisted with a reversed response scale, suggesting that the increase resulted from changes in memory representations. Experiment 3 found that consistent increases in an object's recalled sizes predicted better frequency recall, and Experiment 4 manipulated the presented sizes and found that gradual increases led to better frequency recall. These results demonstrated the flexible memory representations of objects after repeated exposure and carried important implications for typical behavioral experiments.

Current research on eye movements in reading has reached a commonly accepted consensus that eye guidance-specifically, the locations of fixations within words-is determined exclusively by low-level visual features. However, this view has been challenged recently by studies in some agglutinative languages, Uighur and Finnish, where saccades have been shown to be influenced also by high-level linguistic features such as morphological complexity. The present study aimed at establishing the generalizability of the effect by extending it to an understudied written language, traditional Mongolian, with a vertical direction of text. Moreover, the current study adopted a corpus-analytic approach, which offers better ecological validity and captures wider ranges of independent variables using much larger datasets than controlled experiments. Consistent with earlier reports, our results demonstrated an influence of morphological complexity on saccades, with first fixations landing closer to the word beginning for morphologically more complex words. The morphological effect was more robust for shorter words and for less frequent words. The results suggest that Mongolian readers can decompose a saccade-target word parafoveally and modulate their saccade execution accordingly.

One of the critical benchmarks for understanding orthographic processing during word recognition and reading is the transposed-letter effect (e.g., in lexical decision, CHOLOCATE [created by transposing two letters from CHOCOLATE] produces slower and more error responses than CHOTONATE). Two main theoretical frameworks explain this phenomenon: positional uncertainty models, which attribute the effect to uncertainty in letter position encoding that diminishes over time, and open bigram models, which propose a level of ordered pairs of letters between the letter and word levels that may be more resilient to decay. We designed two delayed lexical decision experiments to test whether the transposed-letter effect vanishes or persists at two time delays (750 ms and 1,500 ms). In Experiment 1, a robust transposed-letter effect in accuracy emerged at 750 ms (9.6%) but diminished to a small (2.9%) yet reliable effect at 1,500 ms. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern with a contrast manipulation on the critical letters (e.g., CHOLOCATE vs CHOTONATE), yielding a slightly smaller transposed-letter effect (2.0%) at 1,500 ms. These findings demonstrate that positional uncertainty diminishes over time, yet residual orthographic overlap persists, particularly for a subset of participants, supporting hybrid accounts that combine bottom-up perceptual refinement with top-down contributions from shared sublexical codes (e.g., open bigrams).

"Confidence leak" (i.e., confidence serial dependence) is a phenomenon where confidence from a previous trial predicts confidence in a current trial independent of current choice or accuracy. Confidence leak has been shown to robustly occur across various cognitive domains and tasks. However, it remains unclear what factors, if any, modulate the strength of the confidence serial dependence. Here we investigate whether switching the motor response in a perceptual decision-making task influences the strength of the confidence leak effect. Subjects indicated the orientation of a Gabor patch using their left or right hand, with the response hand being randomly cued on each trial. We found that switching the response substantially weakened the confidence leak effect. We further replicated this finding in a second experiment in which left-hand responses were given using a keyboard and right-hand responses were given with a mouse. In both experiments, we also found that confidence leak was weaker whenever the left hand was used in the previous trial, suggesting that lack of motor fluency reduces the strength of confidence serial dependence. These results demonstrate that switching the motor response weakens serial dependencies and imply that the action required to make a choice can impact one's metacognitive evaluations.

Physical activities are commonly associated with exertion. Yet most of the research to date has focused on the first-person, interoceptive questions of "What are the internal signals associated with exertion?" and "How well do subjective reports correlate with objective measures of energy expenditure?" Here we aim to broaden the scope of this research by asking "How closely are observations of exertion in other people correlated with first-person reports of exertion and objective measures of energy expenditure?" and "What factors influence the accuracy of exertion perception in others?" Although exertion often occurs in the company of other people, there is surprisingly little research on these questions. This is somewhat surprising, since the accurate perception of other people's exertion is often critical, whether that be to cooperate with them, to compete with them, or to encourage them to go on. In this review, we first briefly review the large background on perceived exertion in oneself before turning to our central question of the perception of exertion in others. The small literature we review in the second section offers some clues about the potential exteroceptive signals available from individuals undergoing exertion. A third section in the review considers potential behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the social perception of exertion, by considering the broader literature on action perception and social perception. In a final section, we offer suggestions for future research in this area, with the goal of including the perception of exertion as but one of the many facets of social perception more broadly.

Theories of language and conceptual development have proposed that social relevance is helpful for understanding and acquiring the meanings of abstract words. However, there have been few direct tests of these relationships. In the present study, we used a newly quantified measure of word socialness, alongside word concreteness and valence ratings, to determine if children acquire more social abstract words earlier than less social abstract words. Our analysis included 4,047 words and examined the relationships among word socialness, valence, concreteness, and frequency in relation to age of acquisition ratings and, separately, test-based age of acquisition. We found that socialness significantly predicted age of acquisition, facilitating learning of abstract words more than concrete words. However, this greater benefit to abstract words was diminished when accounting for emotional valence. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between socialness and valence, which suggests there may be subsets of highly social and emotional words that are earlier acquired, regardless of concreteness. Our findings highlight the importance of socialness in word learning and underscore the necessity for a more nuanced examination of social concept subtypes to fully understand its facilitatory role in abstract word acquisition.

Attention is multifaceted, with evidence for distinct mechanisms of attentional facilitation and suppression processes. Interestingly, much less is known about the spatial coordinate system of suppression compared to that of facilitation. The present study examined the coordinate system of spatial suppression by manipulating gaze position and distractor regularities, asking whether suppression is coded in retinotopic (eye-centered) and/or spatiotopic (world-centered) coordinates, and if this varies with more ecological and dynamic contexts. In the current study, we demonstrate that learned spatial suppression primarily transfers across gaze position in retinotopic coordinates; however, in more dynamic contexts favoring spatiotopic information, spatial suppression can be learned in spatiotopic coordinates. These results suggest that the default coordinate system of spatial suppression is retinotopic under static contexts, but suppression can be rapidly learned in spatiotopic coordinates when a spatiotopic representation is beneficial in more naturalistic dynamic contexts.

During conversations, there is often a short silence between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next. These silences tend to be brief. If a speaker waits too long before starting their turn it may trigger a negative interpretation (e.g., that the speaker is lying). We investigated whether the sense that a response took too long is related to the time it typically takes speakers in general to respond to a given question, participants' tendency to over- or underestimate temporal durations, and participants' level of general and social anxiety. Average response time for individual questions was related to variation in participants' sense that a response has taken too long, but biases in time perception, general anxiety, and social anxiety were not.

Intertemporal choices constitute a significant topic of interest in both psychological and behavioral-economics research. While many studies focus on decisions with precisely known reward delivery times, real-world situations typically involve only an imprecise knowledge of these timings (i.e., the delivery times are ambiguous). The current study uses a large size dataset (sample size N > 669) consisting of both risky and intertemporal ambiguous and nonambiguous choices and aims (i) to clarify the relationship between probability-ambiguity and time-ambiguity effects on choice, and (ii) to evaluate different computational models (attribute-wise and integrated-value models) across risky and intertemporal choice domains using a drift-diffusion model (DDM) framework. Analysis of the choice data revealed a significant association: Individuals who were more averse to time ambiguity also exhibited a stronger aversion to probability ambiguity, as indicated by a correlation of r = .28. The DDM analyses revealed that (i) DDMs incorporating ambiguity preferences outperformed models without ambiguity preferences in both the time and probability domain for most participants. Interestingly, (ii) while time-ambiguity aversion was best explained by an attribute-wise model, probability-ambiguity aversion was best explained by an integrated-value model. Finally, we found that (iii) if an individual's intertemporal decisions were best explained by a DDM incorporating ambiguity, then their risky decisions were also most likely best explained by a DDM incorporating ambiguity.Taken together, our results are evidence that ambiguity preferences across the time and probability domains are not independent but show some consistency despite the differing-attribute-wise versus integrated-value-decision strategies in each domain.

Our everyday experiences unfold continuously, yet we segment them into distinct memory units-a phenomenon known as event segmentation. Although extensively studied, the underlying mechanisms of event segmentation remain controversial. This study addresses this by comparing the two contrasting theories: prediction error and contextual stability. Across four experiments, we manipulated these factors separately to examine their distinct impacts on event segmentation, measured by temporal order and distance tasks. Experiments 1-3 demonstrate that contextual stability leads to more pronounced event segmentation than prediction errors in unstable contexts, underscoring its critical role. Experiment 4 further supported this by providing strong evidence for equally robust event segmentation for predicted and unpredicted transitions across stable contexts. We conclude that contextual stability plays a pivotal role in driving event segmentation, outweighing the effect of prediction errors. This study sheds new light on how our minds encode continuous experiences into coherent and meaningful memory units.