Psychonomic Bulletin & Review最新文献

Reverse hierarchy theory began with an important insight from visual learning: training guided by generalities and involving easy discriminations was more efficient than training based on specific, detailed discriminations (Ahissar & Hochstein, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 90 (12), 5718-5722, 1993; Nature, 387 (6631), 401-406, 1997). This later developed into a more general theory concerning the flow of neural signals through the anatomical hierarchy (Hochstein & Ahissar, Neuron, 36 (5), 791-804, 2002). In brief, the contents of visual experience are assembled unconsciously on the way up; conscious experience begins from the top and works its way down. Here we apply this framework to social perception, where the conventional view suggests that social learning begins with detailed, observable behavior. Facial expressions, gestures, and gaze direction are registered and used to infer higher-level mental states, including goals, intent, and beliefs. In this review, we consider a reverse flow, with recursive updating. A prediction cycle begins with an assumption about another's mental states, in a given social context, which is used to interpret the observable behavior. Mismatches between predictions and observables contribute to updated hypotheses in a recursive fashion. We show how this framework offers a solution to three paradoxes in social perception research: (1) preserved action imitation in autism, (2) definitional problems of empathy, and (3) coordinating self- and other-attributions in joint task performance. We claim that adopting this framework will improve our understanding of social perception through new studies with readily testable hypotheses and that it will inspire studies with greater ecological validity.

Numerical and non-numerical quantities are often mapped onto horizontal space. Previous research suggests that culture-related habits, such as reading and writing direction, can influence the orientation of this mapping. While cross-cultural differences have been observed in the spatial representation of time, similar effects have not been consistently found for numbers. This discrepancy has been attributed to the fact that reading and writing involve the sequential processing of information in a specific direction but are not inherently related to numerical content. These findings support the hypothesis that the spatial representation of magnitudes depends on specific experiential associations. The present study investigated potential cross-cultural differences in the spatial representation of visual speed by comparing participants from Italy, who use a left-to-right reading and writing system, with participants from Iran, who use a right-to-left system. Participants judged whether the speed of a centrally presented random dot kinematogram was slower or faster than a reference, using left or right response keys. Results revealed opposite spatial mappings of visual speed: a left-to-right mapping for Italian participants and a right-to-left mapping for Iranian participants. These findings support the view that reading and writing direction shapes the spatial representation of magnitudes intrinsically linked to directional reading experiences, such as motion at a specific speed.

If the sound of a trombone had a taste, would it be bitter? In what way is solving a puzzle like navigating a relationship? People consistently map information across sensory modalities and conceptual domains. Such cross-sensory and cross-conceptual mappings have tended to be studied separately. We argue here that these mappings share underlying mechanisms and are more interconnected than previously thought. We present evidence that these mappings arise from a combination of statistical learning, magnitude matching, valence matching, and semantic mediation, involving an interplay between perception and conception. By bringing cross-sensory and cross-conceptual mappings into a common framework, we offer new insights into how people represent similarity and highlight promising avenues for understanding how humans discover and create connections across seemingly disparate domains.

Previous research shows that being directed to forget (or remember) trait-implying behaviors immediately after encoding impairs memory for behaviors but not inferred character traits, as measured by the false recognition paradigm. We reassessed this finding using a more diverse set of faces, newly piloted behaviors and traits, and a different trait-inference measure - the savings in relearning paradigm (Experiment 1). After encoding faces with trait-implying behaviors, each followed by remember or forget instructions, participants learned face-trait word pairs in which traits were either consistent or inconsistent with the encoded behavior. Participants recalled more consistent than inconsistent trait words, confirming spontaneous trait inferences during behavior encoding. This effect was resistant to forget instructions, replicating previous findings while addressing limitations of the false recognition paradigm. Experiment 2 replicated impaired recall for forget-cued behaviors using our new materials. Experiment 3 further examined the impact of forget instructions on impression formation and use, specifically whether they influence future behavior predictions. Results showed that directing participants to forget (or remember) trait-implying behaviors reduced expectations of future trait-consistent behaviors and increased openness to trait-inconsistent behaviors. This is the first study to demonstrate that directed forgetting can alter expectations about others, indicating that reduced memory accessibility, whether of impressions or original behaviors, can promote greater flexibility in social judgments. These findings inform theories of directed forgetting and impression formation and have practical implications for contexts where forgetting is both warranted and beneficial.

Philosophers have attempted to define the features that make an explanation a good explanation, and psychologists have shown that people are sensitive to many of these features. Psychologists have also pointed out the importance of the phenomenology of explanations: the pleasure we derive from formulating or encountering good explanations would motivate us to seek more explanations. However, it seems that many good explanations do not trigger such positive feelings: they are good explanations, but they are not particularly appealing. We suggest that for an explanation to be appealing, it should not only explain the relevant phenomenon (be explanatory), but it should also be surprising. This is what we observe in three experiments, using both explanations from past studies, and more ecologically valid explanations gathered on the subreddit Explain Like I'm Five. We also find that the usefulness of the phenomenon being explained is another predictor of the appeal of the explanation. Finally, we show that surprisingness ratings do not depend only on whether the explanation was already known, and that their effect on appeal does not decrease when controlling for prior knowledge. Instead, explanations are judged more surprising when others do not know them, and we hypothesize that internal properties of explanations also play a role.

Working memory training (WMT) is one of the most widely studied areas in cognitive training. A central concern in WMT research is the transferability of training effects, which remains a topic of ongoing debate. Recently, an executive n-back paradigm, which increases the manipulation of working memory load, has been proposed as a more suitable approach to assess working memory. In the present study, we examined whether executive n-back training, compared to traditional n-back training, led to broader transfer effects across cognitive tasks. Over six daily sessions, participants completed either the executive n-back task or the traditional n-back task. The findings demonstrated that executive n-back training transferred to the Operation Span task, which also measures working memory but differs structurally from the n-back task, and to the task switching, which assesses cognitive flexibility. Furthermore, these transfer effects persisted even after a 3-month interval. These findings suggest that the executive n-back task is more effective than the traditional n-back task. Moreover, this research sheds light on the potential applications of executive n-back training in enhancing cognitive functions more generally, highlighting its utility in both clinical and educational settings where cognitive flexibility and working memory improvements are critical.

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.