Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

This study explores the impact of visually similar flanking stimuli on central target words using the Flanking Letter Lexical Decision (FLLD) task. Specifically, we investigated whether visual similarity effects can explain orthographic relatedness effects observed in previous FLLD tasks. By employing non-reversal mirror letters as visual flankers, we compared their influence on response times to traditional orthographic-related and orthographic-unrelated conditions. Results confirmed the known facilitative effect of orthographic-related flankers on response times (ROCK ROCK ROCK). However, mirror-related conditions showed no facilitative effect ([Formula: see text] ROCK [Formula: see text]), as evidenced by a Bayesian analysis indicating no significant differences between mirror-related and mirror-unrelated ([Formula: see text] ROCK [Formula: see text]). These findings suggest that low-level visual information in the parafovea does not contribute to the processing of the foveal word in tasks requiring specific word identification. The study concludes that only parafoveal information with relevant linguistic content is spatially pooled across target and flankers during word identification tasks. This research highlights the need to consider task-specific attentional demands and the linguistic relevance of parafoveal information in understanding visual and orthographic processing in reading.

The influence of gaze cues on target prioritization (reaction times (RTs)) and movement execution (movement trajectories) differs based on the ability of the human gaze cue model to manually interact with the targets. Whereas gaze cues consistently impacted RTs, movement trajectories may only be affected when the hands of the human model had the potential to interact with the target. However, the perceived ability to interact with the targets was confounded by the proximity between the model's hands and the targets. The current study explored if the influence of gaze cues on movement trajectories is shaped by the model's potential to access and interact with the targets using their hands or simply the proximity of the hands. A centrally presented human model randomly gazed towards one of two peripheral target locations. Participants executed aiming movements to targets that non-predictively appeared at one location at a stimulus onset asynchrony of 100, 350, or 850 ms. In Experiment 1, the model's hands could not directly access the targets as each was holding a tray. In Experiment 2, the hands had direct access to the targets, but their palms-downwards orientation and wrist-flexed posture rendered efficiently interacting with the targets unlikely. Although RTs showed a facilitation effect of the gaze cue in both experiments, changes in movement trajectories were only observed when the model had direct access to the target (Experiment 2). The results of the current study suggest that the gaze model's direct hand access is necessary for the social gaze cues to influence movement execution.

The link between the cognitive effort of word processing and the eye movement patterns elicited by that word is well established in psycholinguistic research using eye tracking. Yet less evidence or consensus exists regarding whether the same link exists between complexity linguistic complexity measures of a sentence or passage, and eye movements registered at the sentence or passage level. This paper focuses on "global" measures of syntactic and lexical complexity, i.e., the measures that characterise the structure of the sentence or passage rather than aggregate lexical properties of individual words. We selected several commonly used global complexity measures and tested their predictive power against sentence- and passage-level eye movements in samples of text reading from 13 languages represented in the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO). While some syntactic or lexical complexity measures elicited statistically significant effects, they were negligibly small and not of practical relevance for predicting the processing effort either in individual languages or across languages. These findings suggest that the "eye-mind" link known to be valid at the word level may not scale up to larger linguistic units.

Within mathematical cognition the development of conceptual knowledge is seen as critical to developing understanding. Sleep has been well established to play a role in the consolidation of newly learned information and schema-based information but has yet to be explored within mathematical cognition. Across three experiments participants (N = 167) were assigned to a sleep or wake group and then viewed lectures on either p-values, t-test, or z-scores. The sleep group watched the lecture at 9pm, completed an immediate recall task to explain the concept, then a second recall task 12h later at 9am. The wake groups watched the lecture at 9am, and completed an immediate recall task then a second recall task 12h later at 9pm. Written responses were then assessed using a comparative judgement task by subject experts. Across all three experiments, results showed that participants in the sleep group retained their knowledge from the immediate recall to 12 hours later, while in the wake group, participants' knowledge declined significantly between sessions. These results suggest that sleep may be involved in an important process of maintaining the information learned from statistical concepts.

Recent studies have demonstrated hysteresis in studies of syntactic choice in language production (e.g., Koranda et al., 2020). Lebkuecher et al. (2023) further show that the hysteresis effects observed in syntactic choice are similar to the effects observed in motor choice tasks. Here, we examine whether hysteresis can be observed for a different kind of linguistic choice, namely the choice between the spatial demonstratives this and that. We further examine whether these hysteresis effects parallel the hysteresis effects founds in a similar motor task. Our results demonstrate hysteresis in both spatial demonstrative choice and motor choice. Nevertheless, there were some effects that appeared in the motor task that did not appear in the language task (e.g., a response time advantage for repeated choices).

In this article, I take a selective review of work undertaken by my colleagues and me in an attempt to show the enduring importance of the "fine cuts" approach to psychology. This approach highlights the importance of causal, specific, and falsifiable psychological models, and the rigorous experimental designs needed to test them. I hope the review shows that it is still necessary to consider cognition, despite the exciting advances in Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and computational modelling characterising our field.

Decision perseveration is consistently observed in recognition tests, such that judgments tend to repeat (e.g., "old" responses tend to follow "old" responses) across trials. This effect has been found across a range of testing styles including, old/new judgments, judgments of frequency, and confidence, and has been interpreted as reflecting the transfer of mnemonic information between trials. However, an alternative explanation that response repetition is rather the product of motor action perseveration has not yet been fully evaluated. Despite the range of response styles used across studies, repeat decisions have consistently been confounded with repeat motor responses. Across three experiments, the present study divorces decision repetition from motor priming, to determine if decision perseveration maintains. Experiments 1 and 2 found that when participants switch hands between trials, decisions are still more likely to repeat than switch. Similarly, Experiment 3 found no difference in the influence of Previous Decision when mouse paths where able to repeat between trials as compared to when they could not. Additionally, all experiments show a speed advantage for repeating decisions that cannot be attributed to motor priming. We conclude that decision carryover during recognition tests is ultimately a decision-based effect. The results are discussed in terms of mnemonic models of information transfer.

Listeners often find themselves in scenarios where speech is disrupted, misperceived, or otherwise difficult to recognize. In these situations, many individuals report exerting additional effort to understand speech, even when repairing speech may be difficult or impossible. This investigation aimed to characterize cognitive effort across time during both sentence listening and a post-sentence retention interval by observing the pupillary response of participants with normal to borderline normal hearing in response to two interrupted speech conditions: sentences interrupted by gaps of silence or bursts of noise. The pupillary response serves as a measure of the cumulative resources devoted to task completion. Both interruption conditions resulted in significantly greater levels of pupil dilation compared to the uninterrupted speech condition. Just prior the end of a sentence, trials periodically interrupted by bursts of noise elicited greater pupil dilation compared to the silent interrupted condition. Compared to the uninterrupted condition, both interruption conditions resulted in increased dilation after sentence end but before repetition, possibly reflecting sustained processing demands. Understanding pupil dilation as a marker of cognitive effort is important for clinicians and researchers when assessing the additional effort exerted by listeners with hearing loss who may use cochlear implants or hearing aids. Even when successful perceptual repair is unlikely, listeners may continue to exert increased effort when processing misperceived speech, which could cause them to miss upcoming speech or may contribute to heightened listening fatigue.

Proactive interference occurs when older memories interfere with current information processing and retrieval. It is often explained with reference to familiarity, where the reappearance of highly familiar items from the recent past produces more disruption than older, less familiar items. However, there are other forms of familiarity beyond recency that may be important, and these were explored in a verbal recent-probes task. Participants viewed eight targets per trial and then determined whether a probe matched any of those targets. Probes matching a target from the previous trial, rather than an earlier trial, led to more errors, revealing proactive interference. However, this effect was influenced by experimental familiarity (whether stimuli were repeated or unique) and pre-experimental familiarity (whether stimuli were meaningful words or meaningless nonwords). Specifically, proactive interference was strongest for repeated nonwords, and smallest for unique nonwords, but stimulus repetition had little impact for words. In addition, the time separating trials (temporal familiarity) was unrelated to proactive interference. The present findings revealed more complex effects of familiarity than have previously been assumed. To understand proactive interference in a working memory task, it is necessary to consider the role of long-term memory via experimental and pre-experimental stimulus familiarity.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive picture of auditory emotion perception in cochlear implant (CI) users by (1) investigating emotion categorization in both vocal (pseud-ospeech) and musical domains, and (2) how individual differences in residual acoustic hearing, sensitivity to voice cues (voice pitch, vocal tract length), and quality of life (QoL) might be associated with vocal emotion perception, and, going a step further, also with musical emotion perception. In 28 adult CI users, with or without self-reported acoustic hearing, we showed that sensitivity (d') scores for emotion categorization varied largely across the participants, in line with previous research. However, within participants, the d' scores for vocal and musical emotion categorization were significantly correlated, indicating similar processing of auditory emotional cues across the pseudo-speech and music domains and robustness of the tests. Only for musical emotion perception, emotion d' scores were higher in implant users with residual acoustic hearing compared to no acoustic hearing. The voice pitch perception did not significantly correlate with emotion categorization in either domain, while the vocal tract length significantly correlated in both domains. For QoL, only the subdomain of Sspeech production ability, but not the overall QoL scores, correlated with vocal emotion categorization, partially supporting previous findings. Taken together, results indicate that auditory emotion perception is challenging for some CI users, possibly a consequence of how available the emotion-related cues are via electric hearing. Improving these cues, either via rehabilitation or training, may also help auditory emotion perception in CI users.