Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

The speech-to-song illusion is a phenomenon in which the continuous repetition of a spoken utterance induces the listeners to perceive it as more song-like. Thus far, this perceptual transformation has been observed in mostly European languages, such as English; however, it is unclear whether the illusion is experienced by speakers of Bangla (Bengali), an Indo-Aryan language. The current study, therefore, investigates the illusion in 28 Bangla and 31 English-speaking participants. The experiment consisted of a listening task in which participants were asked to rate their perception of repeating short speech stimuli on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 = sounds like speech and 5 = sounds like song. The stimuli were composed of English and Bangla utterances produced by two bilingual speakers. To account for possible group differences in music engagement, participants self-reported musical experience and also performed a rhythm discrimination task as an objective measure of non-verbal auditory sequence processing. Stimulus ratings were analysed with cumulative link mixed modelling. Overall, English- and Bangla-speaking participants rated the stimuli similarly and, in both groups, better performance in the rhythm discrimination task significantly predicted more song-like ratings beyond self-reported musical experience. English speakers rated Bangla stimuli as significantly more song-like than English stimuli. Bangla speakers did not distinguish between English and Bangla stimuli-possibly reflecting their enhanced understanding of English, in comparison to the English participants' comprehension of Bangla. An exploratory acoustic analysis revealed the role of harmonic ratio in the illusion for both language groups. These results demonstrate that the speech-to-song-illusion occurs for Bangla speakers to a similar extent as English speakers and that, across both groups, sensitivity to non-verbal auditory structure is positively correlated with susceptibility to this perceptual transformation.

Studies of cue-outcome contingency learning demonstrate outcome-density effects: participants typically overestimate contingencies when the outcome event is relatively frequent. Equivalent cue-density effects occur, although these have been examined less often. Few studies have simultaneously examined both event density effects or have manipulated the presentation order of the events, limiting knowledge of whether these phenomena share underlying principles. We report three well-powered experiments to address those gaps. Participants judged the effectiveness of a medical treatment after viewing a series of pairings for two events, a cause (treatment given vs. not) and an effect (patient recovered vs. not). Experiment 1 manipulated both event densities independently. We then manipulated the presentation order for the cause and the effect, alongside a manipulation of effect density (Experiment 2a) or cause density (Experiment 2b). Experiment 1 found a large main effect of event density (${\eta }_p^2$ = .55), which was qualified by a significant interaction between event type and density level (${\eta }_p^2$ = .10) whereby effect density had greater impact than cause density. Experiments 2a and 2b found effects for effect density (${\eta }_p^2$ = .60) and cause density (${\eta }_p^2$= .31). The effects of cause-effect presentation order were always small and non-significant. We conclude that effect-density manipulations had substantial impact on contingency judgements, and cause-density manipulations less so. Moreover, it matters little which event (cause or effect) is seen first. These findings have implications for contingency, associative, probabilistic, and causal models of contingency judgement; primarily, that people may be more sensitive to the causal status of events than to their temporal order of presentation.

We hypothesised that people of different language backgrounds (English vs. Mandarin Chinese) might think about evolutionary relationships among living things differently. In particular, some reasoning heuristics may come from how living things are named. Our research examined if sub-word and sub-lexical elements in written Chinese influence people's inferences. Some taxon names in Chinese are conjunctive concepts that include another taxon: e.g., panda is called bear cat in Chinese, and the skunk character has a semantic radical (semantic component of a character) that means mouse. These conjunctions might influence Chinese readers to infer that conjunctive concepts share biological characteristics with their constituents (e.g., that skunks share biological properties with mice). Readers in a language (English) without lexical activation from constituents of conjunctive concepts would not be expected to show such effects. This research provided insights into how differences in prior knowledge due to different language backgrounds affect thinking and reasoning.

As trained educational and developmental psychologists who study the role of working memory in educational outcomes, we know the various assumptions made about definitions and measurements of this cognitive ability. Considering the popularity of the Baddeley and Hitch working memory model in these fields, we raise challenges related to measurement, overlap with executive function, and adopting working memory measurement approaches from adult models. We propose that researchers consider how working memory tasks might tap multiple other abilities. This is problematic in the context of child cognitive development and in understanding which factors explain educational outcomes in children. We recommend giving greater attention to the central executive, acknowledging the overlap between the central executive and executive function in study design, and investigating a developmental model in the context of the broader abilities evoked in measurement. These recommendations may provide a fuller understanding of working memory's mechanistic role in children's learning and development and assist in developing reasonable adjustments for specific aspects of working memory for children who struggle.

Affective words can be classified into two types: emotion words (EM words, e.g., "happy") and emotion-laden words (EL words, e.g., "wedding"). Several studies have shown differences in processing between EM and EL words, although results are inconclusive. These two types of words may have representational differences because affective content is an inherent part of the semantic features of EM words (i.e., denotative meaning) but not of EL words, whose affective content is part of their connotative meaning (i.e., these words do not name emotions, but are associated with emotions). In this study, we tested a set of Chinese EM and EL words. Both conditions included positive and negative words. The study involved two tasks, an implicit task, in which emotional content was not relevant (lexical decision task, LDT), and an explicit task, in which the emotional content was relevant (affective categorisation task, ACT). Our results showed that participants responded faster to EM words than to EL words. This advantage was mostly observed in the ACT and with negative words. These results reveal differences in processing between EM and EL words which can be related to the greater relevance of affective content in the meaning of EM words compared with EL words.

The ability to spontaneously access knowledge of relational concepts acquired in one domain and apply it to a novel domain has traditionally been explored in the analogy literature via the problem-solving paradigm. In the present work, we propose a novel procedure based on categorisation as a complementary approach to assess spontaneous analogical transfer-using one category learning task to enhance learning of the same underlying category structures in another domain. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate larger improvements in classification performance across blocks of training in a target category learning task among participants that underwent a base category learning task relative to a separate group of participants learning the target category structures for the first time, thus providing evidence for spontaneous transfer of the category structures. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate similar evidence of spontaneous transfer for participants that underwent a comparison-based base category learning task under a more rigorous context shift between the base and target category learning tasks. Additional exploratory analyses across both experiments showcase ways in which this paradigm can be used to answer questions regarding the analogical transfer of relational category structures and generate promising paths for future work.

The present research investigates the stability of taste-shape crossmodal correspondences (that is, how people non-randomly associate tastes and visual shapes, such as sweetness matched to roundness) over time, exploring the temporal dimension of crossmodal interactions. While previous research has established the existence of various taste-shape crossmodal correspondences, this study addresses their consistency over time through a test-retest paradigm. Drawing parallels with the concept of synesthesia, in which stability is used as a criterion, the research focuses on taste-shape associations, a domain not previously explored for temporal stability. Participants rated the perceived curvature and symmetry that they associated with taste words (sweet, umami, sour, salty, and bitter) and their liking of tastes and shapes. The same participants performed this task three times over a two-week period. The results consistently replicated previous findings, revealing that sweet tastes were perceived as significantly more curved and symmetrical than other tastes, and umami was rated as more curved and symmetrical than sour, salty, and bitter tastes. Notably, the study found moderate-to-substantial test-retest reliability for the majority of the taste-shape correspondences, indicating robust stability over time. Analyses suggested that differences in assessments between test and retest sessions were primarily due to random error, with no systematic biases. However, a small subset of participants showed significant differences from other participants in their associations, particularly for umami-related correspondences. This research contributes to our understanding of taste-shape correspondences by demonstrating their temporal stability, offering insights into the dynamics of taste, curvature, symmetry, and liking. We posit that consistency might be used as a criterion supporting the existence of a given crossmodal correspondence. The findings have implications for product design and marketing, emphasizing the importance of considering temporal aspects when capitalizing on crossmodal correspondences in creating product expectations and experiences.

Response times and their distributions serve as a powerful lens into cognitive processes. We present a novel statistical methodology called stratified distributional analysis (SDA) to quantitatively assess how key determinants of response times (word frequency and length) shape their distributions. Taking advantage of the availability of millions of lexical decision response times in the English Lexicon Project and the British Lexicon Project, we made important advances into the theoretical issue of linking response times and word frequency by analysing RT distributions as a function of word frequency and word length. We tested these distributions against the lognormal, Wald, and gamma distributions and three measures of word occurrence (word form frequencies obtained from subtitles and contextual diversity as operationalised as discourse contextual diversity and user contextual diversity). We found that the RT distributions were best described by a lognormal distribution across both megastudies when word occurrence was quantified by a contextual diversity measure. The link between the lognormal distribution and its generative process highlights the power of SDA in elucidating mechanisms that govern the generation of RTs through the fitting of probability distributions. Using a hierarchical Bayesian framework, SDA yielded posterior distributions for the distributional parameters at the single-participant level, enabling probabilistic predictions of response times as a function of word frequency and word length, which has the potential to serve as a diagnostic tool to uncover idiosyncratic features of word processing. Crucially, while we applied our parsimonious methodology to lexical decision response times, it is applicable to a variety of tasks such as word-naming and eye-tracking data.

Reallocating object-based attention across the visual field meridians is significantly faster horizontally than vertically (termed the shift direction anisotropy; SDA), implicating the meridians in reorienting object-based attention. Here, we tested the modulatory role of the meridians in the emergence of the SDA by manipulating meridian local feature contrast. Considering the notion of separate pools of attentional resources in each cortical hemisphere, we hypothesised that manipulating the horizontal meridian would selectively modulate the SDA. In four experiments, participants were presented with an "L"-shaped object and detected a target that appeared at either a cued location or at one of two equidistant non-cued locations at the far end of the horizontal or vertical object arm. Meridian local feature contrast was manipulated with perceptually strong enhancements (visible lines and colour contrast borders) and perceptually weak enhancements (illusory borders from line texture patterns and inducers). Weak enhancements of the meridians did not significantly modulate SDA magnitude; however, during perceptually strong enhancements of the horizontal meridian, the SDA was significantly reduced compared with both vertical meridian enhancement and no-enhancement conditions. Moreover, horizontal and vertical shift RTs were statistically equivalent when the horizontal meridian was enhanced with a visible line, our strongest manipulation, indicating the SDA was eliminated. These results suggest that the SDA emerges due to reallocating object-based attention across the horizontal meridian. We interpret this finding as evidence in support of the theory by which anatomical segregations of the visual system determine how pools of attentional resources resolve competition between and within cortical hemispheres.