Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

Can personality, known to shape emotional experiences and gaze behaviors, influence the recognition of subtle emotional facial expressions? Do these personality-related gaze patterns change with emotional intensity? To explore this, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 116 participants who identified dynamic emotional facial expressions of varying intensities (anger, fear, disgust, happiness). Using a multidimensional approach to personality, we clustered participants based on Big Five personality dimensions and anxiety scores, distinguishing those scoring high in dimensions associated with positive (extroversion, agreeableness) versus negative emotions (neuroticism, social anxiety). Results showed that individuals with a positively-colored personality focused more on the mouth (likely seeking happiness cues), while those with a negatively-colored personality focused more on the eyes (likely seeking signs of negative emotions). However, at higher intensity, these gaze patterns persisted only when emotions matched participants' personality (individuals with a negatively-colored personality focused more on the eyes than others, but only when viewing fear or anger). Yet, personality did not affect the sensory discrimination or decision-making processes for subtle emotion identification. Thus, personality, as a multidimensional construct, seems to influence gaze strategies, facilitating emotionally congruent experiences without hindering the recognition of others' emotions, even subtle ones, which is crucial for effective social interactions.

In a spatial Stroop task, responses to gaze stimuli are faster when the direction and location are incongruent (reversed congruency effect), whereas responses to arrow stimuli are faster when congruent (standard congruency effect). To explain the reversal of gaze, Tanaka et al. proposed a dual-stage hypothesis comprising target-background segregation and selective inhibition. This hypothesis predicts that the enhancement of selective inhibition reduces and increases the standard and reversed congruency effects, respectively. As selective inhibition varies on a trial-by-trial basis, we tested the dual-stage hypothesis by examining congruency sequence effects (CSE) in the spatial Stroop task. We analysed the data collected from 409 participants previously tested in our laboratory. The results showed a decrease in the standard congruency effect (standard CSE) and an increase in the reversed congruency effect (reversed CSE) after incongruent trials (N - 1 incongruent) relative to congruent trials (N - 1 congruent). Reaction time distribution analysis revealed that these CSEs emerged from faster responses, suggesting that conflict monitoring in preceding trials enhanced inhibition efficiency in the current trials. These results highlighted the role of selective inhibition in the dual-stage hypothesis. Selective inhibition dynamically changes its size and onset depending on the preceding trial type and contributes to these sequential effects.

Aesthetic Cognitivism posits that artworks have the potential to enhance open-mindedness. However, this claim has not yet been explored empirically. Here, we present two experiments that investigate the extent to which two formal features of the film - temporal and perspectival complexity - can 'open our minds'. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the temporal complexity of the film. Participants (N_total = 100) watched a film (Memento) either in its original non-chronological order or the same film in chronological order. In Experiment 2, we manipulated perspectival complexity in film. Participants (N_total = 100) watched an excerpt from a film (Jackie Brown) that either included the perspectives of multiple characters on an event or a single character's perspective on the same event. Film conditions in both experiments were further compared with a control condition in which participants did not watch a film (N = 50). Participants' open-mindedness was assessed in both experiments through four empirical indicators (creativity, imaginability, cognitive flexibility, openness to new evidence) and in Experiment 2, participants' eye movements, heart rate and electrodermal activity were measured while watching the film. Results showed that watching films, regardless of their temporal or perspectival complexity, modulated only one facet of open-mindedness - cognitive flexibility - when compared to the no-film control condition, providing only limited support for the aesthetic cognitivist claim that artistic films can 'open our minds'. Real-time measures in Experiment 2 revealed that pupil size and number of fixations were modulated by perspectival complexity: both were smaller when watching a film from multiple perspectives compared to a single perspective. Possible explanations for this difference are examined in relation to the viewers' cognitive processes involved in understanding and interpreting film content.

Research suggests that faces learned in high variability conditions (pictures taken on different days, with different viewpoints and lighting) enhanced the learning of own-race identities compared to low variability conditions (pictures taken on the same day, with similar lighting). However, it remains unclear how this variability affects the learning of other-race faces, as they are recognized differently compared to own-race faces. Thus, this study aims to examine the effect of high and low variability exposure on both own-race and other-race face learning. Chinese Malaysian and White participants were exposed to own- and other-race identities under high and low variability conditions. Identity recognition was assessed using a name verification task (Experiment 1) and an old-new recognition paradigm (Experiment 2). Results revealed enhanced learning of own-race faces under high variability conditions compared to low variability across both experiments. However, improved learning of other-race faces was evident only in the old-new recognition paradigm, not in the name verification task. These findings suggest that high variability exposure benefits other-race face recognition but not the face-name association for other-race identities.

In syntactic disambiguation, repeated exposure to less-preferred syntactic analyses may induce changes in parsing preferences, such that processing the less-preferred parses becomes easier while processing the preferred parses becomes difficult, known as "syntactic adaptation". However, previous studies have reported mixed findings, prompting the present study to reexamine this effect, using the ambiguous fragment V + N1 + DE + N2 in Mandarin Chinese, which is compatible with a relative clause (RC) structure (dominant parse) and a complement clause (CC) structure (secondary parse). To investigate whether the relative likelihood of syntactic parses affects syntactic adaptation, we conducted two self-paced reading experiments. Participants read sentences that started with ambiguous fragments with a stronger RC bias (Experiment 1) and a weaker RC bias (Experiment 2) and were later disambiguated as the CC analysis, with the bias manipulated through semantic plausibility. In both experiments, our results did not find adaptation on reading time for the dispreferred parse. We also did not find greater difficulty in parsing the preferred RC structure after exposure to the dispreferred CC structure. The offline comprehension accuracy, however, did show improvement. The comparison between the two experiments shows that increasing the likelihood of the dispreferred parse through semantic plausibility enhances the offline comprehension, but not the online reading time of this parse, highlighting a dissociation between what is syntactically preferred and what ultimately makes sense during sentence processing.

In the psychology of reasoning, researchers have studied which conclusions follow from negative premises (it is not the case), providing in their tasks the choice of affirmative conclusions (it is the case) only. We thought this practice could mask a potential preference for negative conclusions, and indeed, the results of our experiments have corroborated our hypothesis. After reading negative conditional 'if-then' (Experiment 1) or negative biconditional (Experiment 2) statements - for example, 'it is not the case that if/if and only if A, C' - participants preferred to infer the negative conclusion 'it is not the case that A and C' over affirmative conclusions like 'it is the case that if/if and only if A, not-C' (the small-scope interpretation) or 'it is the case that A and not C' (the large-scope interpretation). These results support the idea that whenever people encounter the negation of a conditional or biconditional assertion, they temporarily suspend the negation, flesh out the possibilities of the corresponding affirmative assertions, and then incorporate the negation into the final conclusion. Experiment 3 used the negative conditional 'only if' and ruled out whether this finding can be explained by the matching bias. These results are discussed in the context of current theories of reasoning.

In the field of sensory substitution, research has highlighted the role of participants' actions on the sensors of sensory substitution devices. These observations are in line with the conception of perception as a dynamic process in which action plays an essential role. However, a debate remains between several conceptions. According to the ecological psychology approach, action may correspond to voluntary movements, but also to passive movements that expose us to invariants and enable perception. For the enactive cognitive science approach, action corresponds mainly to voluntary movements, the aim of which is to test sensorimotor contingencies, and give rise to perception. To contribute to this debate, we have set up a visual-to-auditory sensory substitution device coupled with a pantograph system for transferring identical movements. This makes it possible to test two participants simultaneously, one acting voluntarily on the device's sensors, the other subjected to passive movements that are nonetheless correctly associated with auditory feedback. Participants were asked to recognize 2D shapes, and our results show that they improved their perception irrespective of whether the experimental condition was active or passive. Thus, our results confirm that sensory substitution is possible via passive movements.

Cognitive control abilities include maintaining goal-directed behaviors in spite of the incongruence between habitual and desired responses. In interference paradigms, slower responses to incongruent compared to congruent trials are observed; this interference is reduced after incongruent trials (congruence sequential effect, CSE), suggesting that the control exerted to counteract interference in the previous trial also propagates into the following trial. Moreover, a larger CSE is observed when trial features are repeated. Binding-retrieval accounts suggest that trial features that occur in the same time frame are bound together in an episodic representation; if a feature is repeated in the next trial, the control state that was active in the previous trial is also reactivated, resulting in a modulation of congruence effects. However, previous studies that used stimulus sets characterized by intracategory variability (e.g., faces and scenes) observed CSE modulation by the repetition of response categories but were inconclusive concerning whether repeating the identity of a stimulus may modulate CSE. The present study investigates whether episodic stimulus representations include both stimulus identity and response category information, by comparing the impact of the repetition of novel pictures (no identity repetition) and of frequent pictures (in which identity is repeated over trials) in a picture-word interference task. Results indicated that stimulus identity was not critical in the modulation of CSE, and that CSE was little affected by response-stimulus interval. Altogether, the present results contribute to the understanding and theoretical specification of sequential effects.

Humans can recognize a vast number of previously seen images, yet their ability to recall fine details from visual memory remains limited. This study investigated whether prolonged study of a small number of stimuli could improve the recognition accuracy for memorizing details of the scene. We developed a novel experimental paradigm that allowed repeated testing of memory for individual images, allowing us to query images repeatedly and measure which parts of the scene were remembered, and which were forgotten. Our results revealed that participants struggled to achieve high accuracy in detail-oriented memory tasks, even with extensive effort and focus. Follow-up experiments explored potential factors contributing to this limitation, shedding light on why memorizing fine details is inherently difficult. These findings underscore the challenges of achieving high-detail visual memory in long-term memory for complex scenes-although we can memorize large numbers of scenes with low fidelity, we cannot memorize details even in a small number of scenes.

Studies of order effects have often been siloed into those focused on question order effects, which examine pairs of purportedly independent items, and information order effects, which ask participants to combine multiple pieces of information. We present data from both types of tasks demonstrating a previously unreported asymmetry, where negative stimuli have a stronger effect on subsequent positive stimuli than vice versa. Data are reanalyzed from three previously published studies of order effects, as well as two novel experiments; we observed consistent results across a variety of tasks and stimuli. These results are discussed in the context of both traditional models like Hogarth and Einhorn's belief-adjustment model and more recent attempts to use quantum probability theory to model order effects.