Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

Errorless learning strategies such as stimulus fading and stimulus shaping are commonly used to teach complex skills like categorisation and concept formation. Despite widespread use, very few studies have explored the comparative effectiveness of these procedures in well-controlled analyses. The vast majority of existing studies have been undertaken with clinical populations and have involved small numbers of participants (e.g., Single-case designs). The present study sought to compare stimulus fading, stimulus shaping, and trial-and-error learning in a perceptual categorisation task. In Experiment 1, we found robust benefits of stimulus shaping when compared to stimulus fading or trial-and-error learning on measures of initial acquisition of discrimination and one measure of stimulus generalisation. These findings were replicated in a second experiment in which the dimension of fading/shaping was changed from a modification of the comparison stimuli (S-) to a modification of the target stimulus (S +). We discuss the implications of our findings for the selection of errorless learning strategies in clinical settings.

Non-verbal mimicry (i.e., being posturally similar by copying another person's body language) has been shown to increase evaluations of the mimicker. Concurrently, extensive research in social psychology has demonstrated a negative effect on interpersonal evaluations when one perceives others as cognitively dissimilar, often resulting in interpersonal conflicts. Across two experiments (Experiment 1: N = 159, Experiment 2: N = 144), we tested our hypotheses that mimicry, compared with no mimicry, will make mimickers come across as more likable and competent regardless of whether they were perceived as cognitively dissimilar or not (Experiment 1) and regardless of the extent to which they were perceived as cognitively dissimilar (Experiment 2). Broadly, we found support for our hypotheses, and via mediation sensitivity analyses, we found that the effect of mimicry, at least for likability, was mediated by participants' perceived personal similarity to the mimicker. Non-verbal mimicry may thus be one way of alleviating interpersonal conflicts via increasing perceptions of personal similarity regardless of initial cognitive dissimilarity.

To remember to whom we transmit information, we rely on destination memory, with worse performance occurring when participants share personal facts (e.g., my age is . . .) compared with interesting ones (e.g., a shrimp's heart is in its head). When reporting personal information, the internal attentional focus decreases the attentional resources available to associate that information with recipients, resulting in worse destination memory. Given that the poorer destination memory when participants transmitted personal facts was always compared with the transmission of interesting facts, in Experiment 1 (between-participants design: 41 participants) and Experiment 2 (within-participants design: 30 participants), we compared the generation and transmission of personal facts with the transmission of familiar proverbs. Again, the generation and transmission of personal facts hampered destination memory. Besides the type of information (personal vs. familiar proverbs), the conditions differed regarding the type of process (generation vs. transmission of information). To clarify the influence of generation on destination memory, in Experiment 3 (N = 31), participants (1) transmitted and (2) generated and transmitted familiar proverbs, and significant differences in destination memory between the conditions was not observed. In general, our experiments seem to support the assumption that transmitting personal information leads to worse destination memory not because participants generated the information but because personal facts drive the attentional focus to the self.

Why do we trust each other? We carried out three experiments to test whether interpersonal trust depends on perceived self-other overlap. As previous studies suggest that enfacing (feeling ownership for, and include more into oneself of the face of) an avatar might make one trust this avatar more, we exposed participants to faces of ingroup and outgroup avatars that moved in synchrony or out of synchrony with the participant's own facial movements, and assessed the impact of synchrony on self-other overlap and trust measures. Experiment 1 used ingroup faces and successfully showed that synchrony (manipulated within-participants) increased self-other overlap and trust, which we assessed by means of the Trust Game and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Experiment 2, which used outgroup faces and a within-participants design, synchrony still increased scores in the Trust Game but the IAT was no longer affected. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 but with synchrony varying between participants, which eliminated the synchrony effect in both trust measures. Importantly, Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) ratings were found to predict the IAT effect in synchronous conditions. Taken altogether, our findings suggest that interpersonal trust is mainly driven by perceived self-other overlap. Besides group identification, appearance, and voluntary movement, synchrony is just one of several sources contributing to perceived self-other overlap.

Previous research has provided evidence that readers experience processing difficulty when reading words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbour (e.g., TRAIL has the TL neighbour TRIAL). Here, we provide direct evidence that this interference is driven by explicit misidentifications of the word for its TL neighbour. Experiment 1 utilised an eye-tracking task in which participants read sentences aloud and reading errors were coded. Sentences had a target word that either (1) had a TL neighbour or (2) was a matched control word with no TL neighbour. In Experiment 2, participants identified words within sentences that they consciously misread and reported the interloper. In both experiments, readers explicitly misidentified many more of the TL words than control words, and most often for their TL neighbour. These findings support the idea that TL interference effects are due primarily to initial misperceptions and post-lexical checking rather than co-activation at the lexical level.

Wearing a facemask remains a pivotal strategy to prevent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection even after vaccination, but one of the possible costs of this protection is that it may interfere with the ability to read emotion in facial expressions. We explored the extent to which it may be more difficult for participants to read emotions in faces when faces are covered with masks than when they are not, and whether participants' empathy, attachment style, and patient-centred orientation would affect their performance. Medical and nursing students (N = 429) were administered either a masked or unmasked set of 24 adult faces depicting anger, sadness, fear, or happiness. Participants also completed self-report measures of empathy, patient-centredness, and attachment style. As predicted, participants made more errors to the masked than the unmasked faces with the exception of the identification of fear. Of note, when participants missed happiness, they were most likely to see it as sadness, and when they missed anger, they were most likely to see it as happiness. A multiple linear regression analysis showed that more errors identifying emotions in faces was associated with faces being masked as opposed to unmasked, lower scores on the empathy fantasy scale, and higher scores on the fearful attachment style. The findings suggest that wearing facemasks is associated with a variety of negative outcomes that might interfere with the building of positive relationships between health care workers and patients. Those who teach student health care workers would benefit from bringing this finding into their curriculum and training.

We report on two experiments that aimed to test the hypothesis that English listeners orient to full pronunciation forms-"canonical forms"-in judging the tempo of speech that features deletions. If listeners orient to canonical forms, this should mean that the perceived tempo of speech containing deletions is highly relative to the speech's articulation rate calculated on the basis of surface phone strings. We used controlled stimuli to test this hypothesis. We created sentences with one ambiguous word form (for example, support~sport), to give half of the listeners an orthographic form that includes support and the other half an otherwise identical orthographic form with sport. In both experiments, listeners judged the tempo of the sentences, which allowed us to assess whether the difference in imposed interpretation had an impact on perceived tempo. Experiment 1 used a tempo rating task in which listeners evaluated the tempo of experimental stimuli relative to comparison stimuli, on a continuous scale. Experiment 2 used a tempo comparison task in which listeners judged whether second members of stimulus pairs were slower or faster than first members. Both experiments revealed the predicted effect of the imposed word interpretation: sentences with an imposed "schwa" interpretation for the ambiguous word form were judged faster than (the same) sentences with an imposed "no schwa" interpretation. However, in both experiments the effect was small and variables related to the experimental design had significant effects on responses. We discuss the results' implications for our understanding of speech tempo perception.

This study examined for the first time the impact of the presence of a phonological neighbour on word recognition when the target word and its neighbour co-occur in a spoken sentence. To do so, we developed a new task, the verb detection task, in which participants were instructed to respond as soon as they detected a verb in a sequence of words, thus allowing us to probe spoken word recognition processes in real time. We found that participants were faster at detecting a verb when it was phonologically related to the preceding noun than when it was phonologically unrelated. This effect was found with both correct sentences (Experiment 1) and with ungrammatical sequences of words (Experiment 2). The effect was also found in Experiment 3 where adjacent phonologically related words were included in the non-verb condition (i.e., word sequences not containing a verb), thus ruling out any strategic influences. These results suggest that activation persists across different words during spoken sentence processing such that processing of a word at position n + 1 benefits from the sublexical phonology activated during processing of the word at position n. We discuss how different models of spoken word recognition might be able (or not) to account for these findings.

The hand laterality task (HLT) and the foot laterality task (FLT) are used to explore motor imagery, the ability to imagine an action without executing it. With our limbs, we interact with our body, with others, and with the environment. These contacts might cause negative feelings, such as disgust. Disgust is elicited by different drivers. For instance, body products and body envelope violations provoke disgust to avoid contaminations and to avoid damaging our bodies. However, not much is known about how disgust changes our motor imagery processes. In this study, we examined whether there is any difference in the ability to imagine hands and feet when these are emotionally charged with reminders of disgust. Thirty-six participants completed an online version of a classic (neutral) HLT and FLT and two emotionally charged (disgust) versions. Our findings show that when body parts are modified so that they elicit emotional processing, disgust is salient overall, rather than being salient specifically for actions. This is true for both our hands and our feet.

Occasionally, problems are solved with a sudden Aha! moment (insight), while the mundane approach to solving problems is analytical (non-insight). At first glance, non-insight appears to depend on the availability and taxation of cognitive resources to execute the step-by-step approach, whereas insight does not, or to a lesser extent. However, this remains debated. To investigate the reliance of both solution types on cognitive resources, we assessed the involvement of the prefrontal cortex using vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) as an index. Participants (N = 68) solved 70 compound remote associates word puzzles solvable with insight and non-insight. Before, during, and after solving the word puzzles, we measured the vmHRV. Our results showed that resting-state vmHRV (trait) showed a negative association with behavioural performance for both solution types. This might reflect inter-individual differences in inhibitory control. As the solution search requires one to think of remote associations, inhibitory control might hamper rather than aid this process. Furthermore, we observed, for both solution types, a vmHRV increase from resting-state to solution search (state), lingering on in the post-task recovery period. This could mark the increase of prefrontal resources to promote an open-minded stance, essential for divergent thinking, which arguably is crucial for this task. Our findings suggest that, at a general level, both solution types share common aspects. However, a closer analysis of early and late solutions and puzzle difficulty suggested that metacognitive differentiation between insight and non-insight improved with higher trait vmHRV, and that a unique association between trait vmHRV and puzzle difficulty was present for each solution type.