Psychonomic Bulletin & Review最新文献

The performance of the human visual system exhibits moment-to-moment fluctuations influenced by multiple neurocognitive factors. To deal with this instability of the visual system, introspective awareness of current visual performance (metacognitive monitoring) may be crucial. In this study, we investigate whether and how people can monitor their own visual performance during sustained attention by adopting confidence judgments as indicators of metacognitive monitoring - assuming that if participants can monitor visual performance, confidence judgments will accurately track performance fluctuations. In two experiments (N $=$ 40), we found that participants were able to monitor fluctuations in visual performance during sustained attention. Importantly, metacognitive monitoring largely relied on the quality of target perception, a product of visual processing ("I lack confidence in my performance because I only caught a glimpse of the target"), rather than the states of the visual system during visual processing ("I lack confidence because I was not focusing on the task").

Auditory iconic words display a phonological profile that imitates their referents' sounds. Traditionally, those words are thought to constitute a minor portion of the auditory lexicon. In this article, we challenge this assumption by assessing the pervasiveness of onomatopoeia in the English auditory vocabulary through a novel data-driven procedure. We embed spoken words and natural sounds into a shared auditory space through (a) a short-time Fourier transform, (b) a convolutional neural network trained to classify sounds, and (c) a network trained on speech recognition. Then, we employ the obtained vector representations to measure their objective auditory resemblance. These similarity indexes show that imitation is not limited to some circumscribed semantic categories, but instead can be considered as a widespread mechanism underlying the structure of the English auditory vocabulary. We finally empirically validate our similarity indexes as measures of iconicity against human judgments.

It is striking that visual attention, the process by which attentional resources are allocated in the visual field so as to locally enhance visual perception, is a pervasive component of models of eye movements in reading, but is seldom considered in models of isolated word recognition. We describe BRAID, a new Bayesian word-Recognition model with Attention, Interference and Dynamics. As most of its predecessors, BRAID incorporates three sensory, perceptual, and orthographic knowledge layers together with a lexical membership submodel. Its originality resides in also including three mechanisms that modulate letter identification within strings: an acuity gradient, lateral interference, and visual attention. We calibrated the model such that its temporal scale was consistent with behavioral data, and then explored the model's capacity to generalize to other, independent effects. We evaluated the model's capacity to account for the word length effect in lexical decision, for the optimal viewing position effect, and for the interaction of crowding and frequency effects in word recognition. We further examined how these effects were modulated by variations in the visual attention distribution. We show that visual attention modulates all three effects and that a narrow distribution of visual attention results in performance patterns that mimic those reported in impaired readers. Overall, the BRAID model could be conceived as a core building block, towards the development of integrated models of reading aloud and eye movement control, or of visual recognition of impaired readers, or any context in which visual attention does matter.

A variety of different evidence-accumulation models (EAMs) account for common response time and accuracy patterns in two-alternative forced choice tasks by assuming that subjects collect and sum information from their environment until a response threshold is reached. Estimates of model parameters mapped to components of this decision process can be used to explain the causes of observed behavior. However, such explanations are only meaningful when parameters can be identified, that is, when their values can be uniquely estimated from data generated by the model. Prior studies suggest that parameter identifiability is poor when error rates are low but have not systematically compared this issue across different EAMs. We conducted a simulation study investigating the identifiability and estimation properties of model parameters at low error rates in the two most popular EAMs: The diffusion decision model (DDM) and the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA). We found poor identifiability at low error rates for both models but less so for the DDM and for a larger number of trials. The DDM also showed better identifiability than the LBA at low trial numbers for a design with a manipulation of response caution. Based on our results, we recommend tasks with error rates between 15% and 35% for small, and between 5% and 35% for large trial numbers. We explain the identifiability problem in terms of trade-offs caused by correlations between decision-threshold and accumulation-rate parameters and discuss why the models differ in terms of their estimation properties.

The naiveté of the dominant 'cognitive-miser' metaphor of human thinking hampers theoretical progress in understanding how and why subtle behavioural interventions-'nudges'-could work. We propose a reconceptualization that places the balance in agency between, and the alignment of representations held by, people and choice architects as central to determining the prospect of observing behaviour change. We argue that two aspects of representational (mis)alignment are relevant: cognitive (how people construe the factual structure of a decision environment) and motivational (the importance of a choice to an individual). Nudging thinkers via the alignment of representations provides a framework that offers theoretical and practical advances and avoids disparaging people's cognitive capacities.

Although a large body of work has explored the mechanisms underlying metaphor comprehension, less research has focused on spontaneous metaphor production. Previous research suggests that reasoning about analogies can induce a relational mindset, which causes a greater focus on underlying abstract similarities. We explored how inducing a relational mindset may increase the tendency to use metaphors to describe topics. Participants first solved a series of either cross-domain (i.e., far) analogies (kitten:cat::spark-?) to induce a high relational mindset or within-domain (i.e., near) analogies (kitten:cat::puppy-?) (control condition). Next, they received a series of topic descriptions containing either one feature (some jobs are confining) or three features (some jobs are confining, repetitive, and unpleasant), and were asked to provide a summary phrase of the topic. Use of metaphoric language increased when topics contained more features, and was particularly frequent in the high relational mindset condition. This finding suggests that the relational mindset induction may have shifted attention toward abstract comparisons, thereby facilitating the creative use of language involving metaphors.

Hand movements frequently occur with speech. The extent to which the memories that guide co-speech hand movements are tied to the speech they occur with is unclear. Here, we paired the acquisition of a new hand movement with speech. Thirty participants adapted a ballistic hand movement of a joystick to a visuomotor rotation either in isolation or while producing a word in time with their movements. Within participants, the after-effect of adaptation (i.e., the motor memory) was examined with or without co-incident speech. After-effects were greater for hand movements produced in the context in which adaptation occurred - i.e., with or without speech. In a second experiment, 30 new participants adapted a hand movement while saying the words "tap" or "hit". After-effects were greater when hand movements occurred with the specific word produced during adaptation. The results demonstrate that memories of co-speech hand movements are partially tied to the speech they are learned with. The findings have implications for theories of sensorimotor control and our understanding of the relationship between gestures, speech and meaning.

Previous research has suggested that numerosity estimation and counting are closely related to distributed and focused attention, respectively (Chong & Evans, WIREs Cognitive Science, 2(6), 634-638, 2011). Given the critical role of color in guiding attention, this study investigated its effects on numerosity processing by manipulating both color variety (single color, medium variety, high variety) and spatial arrangement (clustered, random). Results from the estimation task revealed that high color variety led to a perceptual bias towards larger quantities, regardless of whether colors were clustered or randomly arranged. This implies that distributed attention may engage in a global assessment of color richness, with less emphasis on spatial arrangement. In contrast, the effect of color on counting was influenced by spatial arrangement: performance improved with clustered colors but declined with random color distribution. This indicates that color interacts with spatial information to modulate focused attention during serial numerosity processing. Taken together, our findings provide new insights into the interaction between numerical cognition and attention, highlighting the need for theories and models of numerical cognition to take into account feature variety and contextual factors, such as the spatial arrangement of features. Additionally, in light of the widespread diversity in real-world environments, our findings could inform strategies to enhance behavioral adaptation to varying environmental conditions.

Lexical competition between newly acquired and already established representations of written words is considered a marker of word integration into the mental lexicon. To date, studies about the emergence of lexical competition involved mostly artificial training procedures based on overexposure and explicit instructions for memorization. Yet, in real life, novel word encounters occur mostly without explicit learning intent, through reading texts with words appearing rarely. This study examined the lexical integration of words learned through text reading. In Experiment 1, two groups of participants read a short book with embedded novel words. Only one group was asked to memorize the unfamiliar words. In the semantic categorization task, we found evidence for lexical competition with slower responses to existing orthographic neighbors (e.g., hublot) of the newly learned words (e.g., hubbot) than to a set of matched items. This effect was found independently of the group 24 h after initial exposure. In addition, a facilitation pattern was observed immediately after the reading session. However, post hoc analyses suggested that the competition effect was mainly driven by the data from the group receiving explicit learning instructions. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the findings obtained in the group without explicit learning instructions. The results revealed the same pattern, characterized by a facilitatory effect immediately after the reading session and an inhibitory effect 24 h after the exposure. Overall, these results showed that lexical competition emerged from a naturalistic reading after a delay, regardless of whether participants were asked to learn novel words or not.

Learning and remembering what things are used for is a capacity that is central to successfully living in any human culture. The current paper investigates whether functional facts (information about what an object is used for) are remembered more efficiently compared with nonfunctional facts. Experiment 1 presented participants with images of functionally ambiguous objects associated with a (made-up) name and a (made-up) fact that could relate either to the object's function or to something nonfunctional. Results show that recall of object names did not depend on whether they were associated with a functional or nonfunctional fact, while recall of the functional facts was significantly better than the nonfunctional facts. The second experiment replicated this main effect and further found that functional facts are remembered more efficiently after they have been associated with confirmatory (as opposed to disconfirmatory) feedback. It is suggested that semantic information is not unitary, and that one way of categorising semantic information is in terms of its adaptive relevance. Potential mechanisms are proposed and discussed, along with suggestions for future research.