Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

The study aims to understand how the impact of social presence on task performance (social facilitation effect), usually measured in face-to-face settings, can be generalised towards remote videoconferencing. The social facilitation effect is expressed in the improvement of task performance on easy tasks, and detriment on difficult tasks, during a social situation versus when performing alone. We tested which videoconferencing channels are responsible for this performance change. The interaction occurred within an experimentally controlled naturalistic videoconferencing setting. The participants performed visual-reasoning tasks as quickly and accurately as possible under several conditions: when screen-sharing their task performance, having their video on, seeing the video of the researchers' interactive avatar, and with all these channels on or all off. Based on two social facilitation effect phenomena, we predicted that participants' performance might change when it is watched (audience effect) by the researcher through screen-sharing and when participants or the researcher co-share their videos during videoconferencing (mere presence effect). We found that having participant video visible to the companion improved participants' performance accuracy on difficult tasks, whilst task screen-sharing improved speed on correct easy tasks, with no significant effect from the researchers' visual presence. We entertain the notion of soft-presence and propose ways forward.

Becoming a skilled reader requires that children accumulate extensive experience with text through independent reading. Research shows that greater text experience is associated with stronger reading skills, better comprehension, and improved spelling, and, consequently, higher reading motivation. Reliable objective measures of children's reading experience are therefore essential; however, because such measures are typically highly sensitive to temporal and cultural contexts, none of the existing tests are suitable for capturing the reading experience of British children today. We address this gap by introducing a new Author Recognition Test (ART) and Title Recognition Test (TRT) designed specifically for primary school children in the United Kingdom and validated with a large cohort of British pupils. The battery also includes a new multiple-choice spelling test that can be easily administered online. We further demonstrate that single-word reading and sentence reading efficiency tests from the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) can be adapted for use with British children and provide valid measures of reading proficiency. Together, these tools offer a much-needed, freely available resource for both researchers and practitioners, enabling reliable measurement of children's text experience and basic literacy skills. The test battery is openly available on https://osf.io/gmv72/.

Research has found atypical counterfactual production in autistic children, yet intact counterfactual reasoning in autistic adults. To date, however, no research has investigated counterfactual production in autistic adults. The current study combined a counterfactual production task with eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to examine how autistic and neurotypical adults plan and initiate counterfactual responses. Autistic participants showed slower speech initiation and more disfluencies, consistent with broader speech production patterns, but did not experience greater difficulties with counterfactual production itself. Both groups also showed a comparable preference to produce additive counterfactuals, suggesting developmental convergence by adulthood. By contrast, while both groups showed a strong preference to produce and fixate human causes, this bias was stronger among neurotypical adults than autistic participants, who more often considered physical causes and were less influenced by salient social cues. Additionally, speech-locked eye movements revealed group differences: neurotypical adults flexibly modulated their gaze to human causes depending on whether they produced factual or counterfactual responses, whereas autistic adults showed more uniform gaze patterns across conditions. These findings highlight shared competencies but distinct social-cognitive strategies in counterfactual production across groups.

Historical research has previously described sex differences in mental rotation ability. Here, we sought to determine whether such sex differences still exist via a systematic review and meta-analysis. Using the University of Nottingham's Library database, Google Scholar and PubMed, all studies investigating sex differences in mental rotation since 2010 were considered. Existing meta-analyses, along with studies that did not compare both males' and females' biological sex, used stated mental rotation tests (MRT) and did not make the full text available, were excluded. The systematic review identified 41 relevant studies, and a meta-analysis was carried out on 59 effect sizes from this sample. Analysis found that males performed better than females in mental rotation tasks, and the effect size (d = 0.60, 95% CI [0.54 to 0.67]) was of a similar magnitude to prior meta-analyses. Subgroup analysis also confirmed that the MRT produced the greatest effect size. An Eggers test reported no evidence of publication bias; however, there was significant heterogeneity within the research data. Overall, these results are consistent with previous research; however, raise questions as to why the MRT elicits significantly greater effect sizes than other mental rotation assessments.

In perception experiments, researchers often collect multiple perceptual judgements from the same stimuli and participants to answer their research questions. While the way in which perceptual judgements are collected may affect the data, research rarely considers task design when investigating this topic. We therefore investigated how two frequently used methods of collecting multiple ratings can affect perceptual judgements, focusing on first impressions of faces. One participant group provided ratings of seven person characteristics (e.g. femininity, youthfulness, trustworthiness) blocked by characteristic, rating faces for one person characteristic at a time, across seven blocks. Another participant group completed one block in which they rated all seven characteristics simultaneously via a list of rating scales. The listed presentation format reduced task duration by 22%, but affected the perceptual ratings in several ways, pointing to reduced data quality, potentially as a result of satisficing behaviours. Specically, inter-rater agreement was lower for some person characteristics (youthfulness, femininity, and trustworthiness) in the listed format. Variance in ratings was also reduced for youthfulness, femininity, and dominance, with ratings clustering closer to the middle of the scale. Importantly, correlations between different person characteristics became universally positive in the listed format, indicating reduced independence of judgements. These findings highlight that while presenting multiple judgements at the same time may offer efficiency, this approach can introduce systematic biases and potentially reduce the reliability of perceptual data. We therefore suggest using a blocked presentation format and consider how these trade-offs would impact experiments looking at multiple perceptual judgements collected from the same participants.

Interaction with objects typically involves both vision and touch. Understanding how visual and haptic information interact during object exploration is essential to uncovering the mechanisms of multisensory shape perception. We investigated whether haptic exploration influences subsequent eye movements, using a cross-modal shape comparison task. Participants (N = 22) explored 3D replicas of bell peppers either haptically or visually, and subsequently viewed the same or a different object. We tracked eye movements during visual explorations. Comparing uni-modal visual to cross-modal, haptic-to-visual conditions, we found that prior haptic exploration led to significantly shorter fixations, longer and faster saccades, as well as larger coverage of the image with fixations during subsequent visual exploration - indicative of a broader, more distributed scanning pattern. These effects suggest that visual saliency is modulated by prior tactile experience, challenging purely unimodal or bottom-up models of attentional guidance.

Previous research has confirmed the effect of monetary reward on selective attention, but the influence of social reward has yet to be fully investigated. To address this issue, we employed a modified two-rectangle paradigm paired with the monetary incentive delay task or social incentive delay task. In this paradigm, reward cues were implemented symbolically and were not linked to performance-based rewards. In Experiment 1, the relative value of monetary reward diminished object-based attention without affecting space-based attention (SBA). In Experiment 2, the stability of the SBA effect was confirmed, but the elimination of the object-based attention effect due to the relative value of non-verbal social reward was only observed in women. In Experiment 3, we found that verbal social reward resulted in similar effects as monetary reward in Experiment 1 when non-verbal information bias was controlled. The results contribute further evidence to the extended common currency schema and are consistent with the view from prospect theory that relative, context-dependent value can influence early attentional processing across different reward types.

We conducted a cued target localization experiment to examine inhibition of return (IOR) in a computer-simulated three-dimensional (3D) environment. Cues and targets were presented either on the same or different depth planes, and on the same or opposite sides. In trials where cues and targets were at different depths, they were positioned either within a single object extending across depth or across two distinct objects separated along the depth axis. IOR was reduced when the cue appeared farther than the subsequent target (a far-to-near switch), compared to when both appeared at the same depth. Notably, this depth-specific reduction in IOR only emerged when the cue and target appeared between different objects, not when they were part of the same object. By contrast, no such effect was found for near-to-far depth switches. These findings suggest that IOR can be modulated by both depth and object structure, but only under specific spatial configurations-particularly when attention shifts from a farther to a nearer location across separate objects.

The peripersonal space is a multisensory interface between the body and the environment, which can be modulated by the presence of objects or other agents. However, how the presence of artificial agents affects the representation of peripersonal space is still poorly understood. We conducted four experiments in which participants had to judge objects' reachability for themselves or for another agent. In Experiment 1, participants performed the reachability task alone. In Experiment 2, participants interacted with another human partner. Experiment 2b was a control condition to test task's physical properties. In Experiment 3, participants performed the task with the humanoid robot iCub, programmed to exhibit motor and social behaviours. The results showed that the extent of the peripersonal space was influenced by the presence of another agent, as participants narrowed their own peripersonal space in a social context, compared to performing the task alone. Furthermore, they perceived their own peripersonal space as larger, compared to the peripersonal space of another human agent (Experiment 2) or humanoid robot (Experiment 3). This suggests that the motor repertoire of a human and a humanoid embodied artificial agent is similarly perceived. The present evidence may open new avenues for space perception in social interactions.

Losses and errors often slow down subsequent reaction times (RTs). This is classically explained in terms of a shift towards more cautious, therefore slow, behaviour. Recent studies of gambling, however, reported faster RTs following losses, so-called post-loss speeding, often attributing these to behavioural impulsivity arising from frustration. Here we instead investigated post-loss speeding in the context of a task that allowed behavioural adaptation and learning, namely probabilistic reversal learning (PRL). We additionally used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how losses influence subsequent markers of action generation (readiness potential [RP]) and outcome evaluation (feedback-related negativity [FRN] and P300). Our results confirm faster RTs after losses than after wins in PRL, thus extending post-loss speeding from gambling to cognitive contexts where learning is possible. Previous losses did not affect subsequent RP amplitudes. However, compared to wins, previous losses led to more positive FRN and more positive P300 amplitudes elicited by subsequent outcomes. Furthermore, faster RTs were associated with more negative FRN amplitudes irrespective of previous or outcome valence. We hypothesise that post-loss speeding in PRL may represent a form of signal chasing, allowing participants to behaviourally modulate neurophysiological responses and thereby potentially establish agency by influencing internal neurophysiological signals.