Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

The ideomotor principle holds that actions can be initiated by anticipating their perceptual effects. While recent work suggests that effect anticipations rely on transitions rather than end-states, this has been shown only for visual effects. Here, we extended present approaches by investigating tactile effects. In two experiments, keypresses stopped vibrations on either the same (transition-compatible) or opposite (transition-incompatible) key, and we varied the task relevance of these effects. In Experiment 1 (task-irrelevant effects), compatibility influenced neither response times nor error rates. In Experiment 2 (task-relevant effects), response times were still not significantly influenced, but the error rates provided subtle evidence for transitional representations of tactile action effects. Our results not only challenge the predominant assumption of state-based effect representations but also provide insights for the temporal analysis of action effect structures and relate ideomotor learning to theories of optimal Bayesian integration.

Embodied cognition holds that processing motor-related words necessitates the simulation of motor information. Numerous studies have found impairments in processing motor semantics among older adults with neurodegenerative diseases. However, the impact of healthy aging on motor semantic processing remains controversial. In this study, three experiments were conducted to investigate whether healthy aging affects motor representations and motor semantic processing, with a focus on the modulation of the degree of Body-Object Interaction (BOI) and tasks. Experiment 1 adopted a BOI rating task and revealed that ratings of healthy older adults were not significantly lower than those of younger adults. This suggested that motor representations in older adults might not be notably impaired or might be relatively preserved. Experiments 2 and 3, employing a lexical decision task and a semantic categorization task, respectively, found that healthy older adults exhibited a facilitatory BOI effect, further indicating the relative preservation of motor representations and motor simulation. Although older adults exhibited slower responses in both lexical processing tasks, this may be attributed to a decline in domain-general executive control. Overall, these experiments demonstrated that healthy aging might not lead to notable degradation in motor information. However, whether the motor semantic processing of healthy older adults is modulated by tasks still needs further exploration.

This study investigated how color is represented in language comprehension. Some theories suggest that perceptual simulations-activations of sensory features such as shape, size, or color-routinely support understanding during reading. One line of evidence is the "mismatch effect" in sentence-picture verification tasks: responses are slower when pictures mismatch perceptual details described in the sentence. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 222), we tested whether this mismatch effect occurs with explicit color words (Experiment 1) and whether background colors presented concurrently interfere with the mental simulation of color to test the functionality of mental simulations in language comprehension (Experiments 2 and 3). As expected, participants responded faster when pictures matched the sentence's color across the three experiments. When conflicting background colors were introduced during sentence presentation, the mismatch effect remained unaffected. This pattern of findings suggests that colors are routinely activated through color words during comprehension, but the functional role of perceptual simulations of color for comprehension remains unclear.

Despite increasing interest in emotional aspects of vocabulary learning, language education still lacks effective methods to both induce and assess emotional meaning acquisition. The present study introduces the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) as a novel and pedagogically relevant tool for exploring how neutral words can acquire emotional connotations through incidental exposure. By combining AMP with lexical concreteness judgments and socially embedded emotional cues, we investigated how learners integrate affective information into vocabulary representations. During the learning phase, participants viewed emotionally expressive images (happy, fearful, angry, and sad) followed by a concreteness judgment of neutral words. Emotional ratings before and after learning were compared to assess emotional acquisition. Results showed that concrete ones could acquire happy and fearful emotional valence. Social cues enhanced the acquisition of positive emotions in concrete words and negative emotions in abstract words. These findings offer both theoretical and methodological contributions to affective vocabulary learning. AMP not only enables implicit measurement of emotional meaning acquisition but also serves as a powerful design for emotion-integrated vocabulary instruction. This study supports the development of emotionally responsive language learning materials and highlights the potential of AMP as a bridge between language learning, emotional engagement, and pedagogical innovation.

Research on visual word recognition has shown that letter and word processing is largely immune to variations in surface properties, such as lowercase/UPPERCASE or CaSe MiXinG presentation, which points to the existence of abstract letter representations. However, in languages with non-alphabetic scripts, a word is represented by a character or symbol, rather than a string of letters. How do biscriptal readers with a primary non-alphabetic orthography read alphabetic words? In the current study, 54 native readers of English and 48 logographic-script (Chinese and Japanese) readers performed a lexical decision task on English words and nonwords presented in upper- or lowercase. In line with previous research, case variation had only a very minor effect for the alphabetic readers, but it was much more pronounced for the logographic-script readers, and the case effect emerged both in words and nonwords. Findings are discussed in terms of abstractionist versus episodic accounts of letter processing.

As for the syntax-semantic relationship, there have been two conflicting views in the literature, debating whether children's development of syntax is dependent on semantics or not. This study delved into this problem by studying Mandarin-speaking children's elicited production of recursive relative clauses (RCs) in different semantic conditions. A 4 (Syntactic Types) × 2 (Semantic Conditions) × 10 (Age) design was used. The syntactic types included: subject-gapped RC in object-gapped RC, object-gapped RC in object-gapped RC, object-gapped RC in subject-gapped RC, and subject-gapped RC in subject-gapped RC. Each type was tested under irreversible internal semantics (IIS) and reversible internal semantics (RIS). Moreover, participants received speech-visual stimuli providing irreversible external semantics (IES). The study recruited 359 Mandarin-speaking children (aging from 3-11 years old) and 80 adult controls. The findings indicate that children produced the four types of recursive RCs in the IIS-IES condition one to three years earlier than their counterparts in the RIS-IES condition. The findings supports a modified syntax-semantics interface theory which involves a two-stage development path in the acquisition of syntax: The language acquisition device starts with a syntax-IIS interface and ends with a syntax-IES interface.

Interference tasks (e.g., the Stroop task) exhibit low test-retest reliability, which hinders the measurement of individual differences. This study examined whether controlling the interference rate improves reliability. The interference rate is a metric derived from the Horse-Race Model, defined as the probability of experiencing semantic-color conflict in incongruent Stroop trials (distinct from list-wide congruency, i.e., the proportion of incongruent trials in a block). In Studies 1a and 1b, interference rate was positively correlated with the magnitude of the Stroop effect, indicating that it accounts for meaningful individual variability. In Study 2, the fixed-interference-rate group (IR-fixed) had their interference rate controlled at 75% across two testing sessions (2-week interval) by adjusting the stimulus-onset asynchrony between semantic and color features (i.e., ensuring a 75% probability of experiencing interference in incongruent trials). Compared to the random-interference-rate group (IR-random), the IR-fixed group showed significantly higher test-retest reliability and stronger cross-session predictability of the Stroop effect, demonstrating that controlling the interference rate enhances measurement stability. Studies 1b and 2 also revealed moderate cross-session correlations for interference rate, regardless of whether the interval was a single Stroop task administration or 2 weeks. Furthermore, across all studies, interference rate exhibited poor internal consistency (McDonald's ω < .60). Overall, the results suggest that interference rate can predict the Stroop effect but is not a stable psychological trait; instead, it fluctuates within a certain range. Therefore, failing to control the interference rate adversely impacts the test-retest reliability of the Stroop task.

There is evidence that temporal order information is both encoded and retrieved automatically as a part of episodic memories. However, the influence of this temporal information on recall is modulated by strategic control processes. It is unclear if these processes operate primarily at encoding, by affecting learning, or at retrieval, by organizing memory search. To address this question, we independently manipulated encoding and retrieval strategies. In this experiment, undergraduate participants studied two word lists. Participants were initially told to focus on either temporal or semantic associations and ignore the other (initial strategy). These instructions were used for encoding and recall of List 1 and encoding of List 2. Before recalling List 2, half of the participants were instructed to switch strategies, while the other half kept the same strategy (test strategy). Temporal contiguity was observed in all conditions, even when participants were instructed to completely ignore temporal associations. The initial strategy had no effect on overall temporal or semantic organization. However, there was an effect of test strategy. A semantic test strategy greatly reduced temporal contiguity and enhanced semantic contiguity. Variations in temporal and semantic contiguity may be primarily due to differences in control processes operating at retrieval rather than encoding.

Word problems are notoriously difficult for students to solve and require both mathematical and linguistic processes. Moreover, word problem-solving performance might also be negatively affected by mathematics (math) anxiety, particularly when task complexity increases. Therefore, the study investigated whether math anxiety impacts word problem performance, particularly when mathematical difficulty (i.e., arithmetic carry/borrow operations) or linguistic difficulty (i.e., lexical consistency) increases. In an online experiment with N = 129 adults, we observed that higher math anxiety levels were related to lower performance in word problem-solving. Moreover, math anxiety particularly affected performance in linguistically - but not arithmetically - difficult word problems. This suggests that math-anxious individuals particularly struggle during word problem-solving when the text was more difficult to translate into an arithmetic problem. Therefore, the anxiety-complexity effect in word problems holds for math anxiety affecting the resolution of linguistic complexity rather than arithmetic complexity.

The Cross-Race Effect (CRE) refers to the repeated finding that individuals are better at recognizing faces belonging to members of their own racial or ethnic ingroup. While this effect has been widely studied on memory, fewer studies have explored whether judgments of learning (JOLs) are also sensitive to this pattern. In two experiments, Black and White participants made JOLs while studying high typicality same and other-race faces (Experiment 1) or a mix of high and low typicality faces (Experiment 2). We replicated the CRE on memory, as participants were better at recognizing and showed greater discriminability for same-race faces. Importantly, the CRE pattern extended to JOLs. However, this pattern was linked to participant ethnicity, as only Black participants' JOLs were sensitive to the CRE. For White participants, mean JOLs did not differ between same and other-race targets, regardless of typicality. Responses on racial attitude measures showed that White participants displayed stronger internal motivations to appear non-prejudiced; however, correlational and mediation analyses revealed that this JOL pattern was not driven by differences in racial attitudes or motivations. Thus, while JOLs can be sensitive to the CRE, this effect varies by participant ethnicity, underscoring the influence of social experience on metacognitive judgments.