Psychonomic Bulletin & Review最新文献

Acquiring non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) from continuous sequences can be challenging for adults, with prior research showing varied outcomes depending on the properties of the stimuli and methods of assessments. This study investigated whether different behavioral tasks vary in their ability to detect NAD learning. All participants (N = 322) underwent equivalent training phases involving exposure to NAD trigrams in a continuous speech stream. During the test phase, their learning of the grammatical NAD patterns was evaluated using either a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC, N = 200) task or a familiarity rating task (N = 122). Participants in the 2AFC task performed at chance, regardless of whether the ungrammatical trigram differed minimally or maximally from the grammatical trigram. In contrast, participants in the familiarity rating task rated grammatical trigrams as more familiar than ungrammatical ones, suggesting that the familiarity rating task may be more sensitive to subtle learning effects. These findings highlight the importance of task design in the detection of NAD learning, with implications for the broader field of statistical learning research.

The present study explores the effect of exposure to news in a social media environment on people's perceived knowledge and on the "Illusion of knowledge" -that is, the overestimation of perceived knowledge relative to actual knowledge. Using a mixed, within-subjects design, participants (N = 828) engaged in a two-session study featuring pre- and post-exposure assessments. Participants scrolled through a social media newsfeed and completed assessments of perceived and actual knowledge. We hypothesized that (1) social media exposure would increase perceived knowledge, (2) this increase would not align with actual knowledge, and (3) higher topic involvement would exacerbate these effects. While most of the preregistered hypotheses did not receive clear statistical support, some effects were consistent with our predictions. Perceived knowledge increased over time, suggesting a general exposure effect; however, differences between exposed and non-exposed topics were not statistically significant, possibly due to test effects or limited engagement with the platform. A strong illusion of knowledge was observed across topics, suggesting robust overestimation. This high baseline may have created a ceiling that constrained the detection of exposure effects. This study was conducted as a Registered Report ( https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100986 ), accepted in principle prior to data collection. To our knowledge, it represents one of the most ecologically valid attempts in the literature to simulate social media exposure in an experimental setting.

The allocation of attention is now widely understood to reflect the joint influence of goal-directed, stimulus-driven, and selection history-driven mechanisms of control. The influence of selection history is often discussed in the context of the involuntary control of attention, competing with goal-directed influences. Here, we argue that selection history also influences voluntary, goal-directed mechanisms of control, shaping the manner in which intentional prioritization of stimuli occurs. In this respect, the habitual guidance of attention is not limited to mechanisms of priority assignment that operate without respect to observers' goals and intentions; rather, the goal-directed control of attention itself is sensitive to habit-like mechanisms of priority assignment. This has implications for how we characterize mechanisms of attentional control, blurring the distinction between goal-directed and selection history-driven influences and raising important questions concerning the degree to which the intentional control of attention is biased by prior learning.

Prioritized items within working memory often show higher accuracy or faster response times at test. This prioritization benefit is thought to reflect the memory representation being within the focus of attention. The literature on prioritization effects lacks consistency in whether prioritization benefits manifest as a benefit to speed, accuracy, or both, implying that some findings may reflect a speed-accuracy tradeoff rather than improved memory representation. In the present work, we use drift-diffusion modeling to test two theoretical questions regarding prioritization effects without the possibility of a confounding speed-accuracy tradeoff. First, we test whether prioritization effects rely on shifting limited working memory resources away from non-prioritized items. Second, we test whether prioritization and recency effects are two distinct mechanisms or two ways to enter the focus of attention. We find that prioritization effects do reflect shifts in limited working memory resources and that prioritization and recency are two distinct mechanisms. These findings are augmented by model fits suggesting differential effects of prioritization at the perceptual/motor and cognitive levels.

Understanding the allocation and deployment of attention in the human visual system for tracking multiple moving objects in dynamic scenes is critical for both theoretical advancements and practical applications. Previous research using various neuroimaging techniques has yielded conflicting views regarding the initial processing stage at which attentional modulation influences Multiple Object Tracking (MOT)-specifically, whether it initiates in early visual regions or at later processing stages. To address the question, we utilized a dichoptic MOT paradigm, where the retinal position of tracking targets between the eyes swapped while the visual perception remained consistent. Results showed that interocular target switching significantly decreased tracking accuracy, demonstrating a monocular advantage for MOT. This advantage was specifically attributed to the interocular switching of target information, rather than general interocular switching of any stimuli, sensory confounds, or differences in the proportion of binocularly imbalanced attentional distribution between the two eyes. These findings suggested that attentional modulation in MOT initiates at an early stage of visual processing, particularly at or before the primary visual area (V1), and may involve subcortical structures containing monocular neurons. Our findings enhanced understanding of the early mechanisms of attentional modulation in MOT and could have clinical implications, providing a novel quantitative method to evaluate the impact of interocular interaction deficits on sustained attention in conditions like strabismus and amblyopia.

Similarity lies at the core of theories of memory and perception. To understand similarity relations among complex items like text and images, researchers often rely on machine learning to derive high-dimensional vector representations of those items. To use these representations to explain and predict human performance, a cognitive model must establish a relationship between vector similarity and the psychological construct of similarity. To that end, I introduce SALR ("similarity as likelihood ratio"), a mathematical transformation of the similarity between vector representations, operationalized as the cosine of the angle between them, into a ratio of the relative likelihood that the two representations encode the same versus different items. The likelihood ratio operationalizes similarity in a manner that is motivated by theories of perception and memory while also being readily "plugged in" to existing cognitive models. Three example applications show how SALR can be used to compute drift rates of a diffusion decision model based on similarity information derived from machine learning models, thereby accounting for the speed and accuracy with which individual participants respond to individual items. SALR enables inferences regarding how different people represent items, how much information they encode about each item, and how that information is affected by experimental manipulations. SALR serves both the practical purpose of making it easier to incorporate representations from machine learning - indeed, any method in which similarity is operationalized as a cosine - into cognitive models and the theoretical purpose of allowing cognitive models to grant insight into how people process the increasingly complex, naturalistic items to which machine learning models are applied.

In some visual search scenarios, the presence of a singleton distractor leads to faster search performance. This has been coined as the inhibition effect and is believed to represent avoidance of the singleton distractor. Research has identified two contributing components: a bias towards target features, target-feature enhancement, a bias away from distractor features, distractor-feature suppression. The current study examines how each of these effects independently develops in response to novel stimuli. In short blocks participants completed a search for a pre-defined target shape. Each block the colour of the target and the distractor were randomized so that the initial and subsequent attentional adaptations to these features could be assessed (via eye-tracking). These mini-blocks reveal substantial information about the development of the inhibition effect. Incredibly, we observe the classic inhibition effect (shorter RTs on distractor-present trials) as soon as the second trial of each block. Furthermore, the effect emerged even if it was the first presentation of the distractor feature. Gaze analysis concurs with this, eyes avoided the distractor when the target feature was known, but the distractor feature unknown. This shows compelling evidence for guidance from target-feature enhancement. However, some evidence for distractor-feature suppression is observed, further oculomotor suppression of the distractor is seen after its initial presentation. Together, the current results show that the inhibition effect develops rapidly in visual search displays, and that while a large portion of the effect can be accounted for by target-enhancement, distractor-suppression may still have a role in influencing attentional allocations.

The status of thought suppression in contemporary psychology remains ambiguous. The literature contains claims both about its counterproductive consequences and about its potential utility. The aim of this article is to review and evaluate evidence concerning the effectiveness and adaptiveness of thought suppression across different research traditions. The first part of the paper examines effectiveness. Studies from the two main paradigms-the white bear and the think/no-think paradigms-are compared. Findings suggest that, in healthy populations, suppression can be effective, while paradoxical effects have not been convincingly demonstrated. The second part addresses adaptiveness. Questionnaire studies, clinical observations, and (quasi-)experimental research are discussed. This body of evidence indicates that thought suppression may be adaptive, depending on factors such as individual differences and context. Finally, potential desirable and undesirable suppression outcomes are discussed.

A large portion of words in a language are formed by combining smaller meaningful units called morphemes (e.g., teach + -er → teacher). Understanding a language's morphology is vital for skilled reading as it allows readers to interpret both familiar and unfamiliar words (e.g., tweeter). It is widely agreed that children rely on reading experience to acquire morpheme knowledge in English, and emerging research suggests that different aspects of this experience may impact affix learning in different ways. We contrasted three potential definitions of what constitutes readers' affix experience using the morpheme interference paradigm with 120 adults. We found that skilled readers' affix knowledge most closely aligns with a definition proposing that affix learning is primarily supported by experience with words in which affixes are identifiable without specialised linguistic knowledge. Due to the nature of morpheme presentation in English orthography, this excludes a significant number of genuinely complex words, while including affix-like patterns in non-meaningful contexts (e.g., -er in corner). This definition also posits that these morphological false alarms actively hinder learning. Our research represents a critical step towards a psychologically realistic theory of morpheme learning from text experience.