Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

Past research from our lab has suggested visual demands in video games serve to exercise attentional-oculomotor (A-O) processing in a manner beneficial to reading. However, testing the effect of video games on reading typically requires long timeframes (e.g., multiweek training or years of accumulated video game experience). The current study manipulated within-experiment peripheral and central demands to evaluate the effects of A-O exercise on task performance. Our study included two tasks: an orthographic lexical decision task (OLDT), designed to optimise orthographic lexical processing, and a novel graphic-based health bar decision task (HBDT). In Experiment 1, the stimuli were presented centrally in one block and peripherally in another block to manipulate A-O exercise. We observed greater improvements in the peripheral-first than the central-first group, particularly for the OLDT. In Experiments 2 and 3, we focused on the OLDT, with the HBDT serving as the A-O exercise task, and observed improvements in both centrally and peripherally trained participants. We additionally observed, through analyses of word and bigram frequency, a double dissociation, whereby increased target word frequency was associated with faster target reaction times and improved error rates, whereas increased foil bigram frequency was associated with slower foil reaction times and worse error rates. Taken together, the experiments demonstrate a mechanism beyond simple task learning that drives reading improvements, and A-O exercise, even if movements are small, appears to play a role in the improvements observed. We suggest future research should further develop this paradigm and examine its utility for reading remediation in dyslexia.

This study investigated how children's punishment affective states change over time, as well as when children begin to prioritise intentions over outcomes in their punishment decisions. Whereas most prior research sampled children from Anglo-America or Northwestern Europe, we tested 5- to 11-year-old children from Colombia and Spain (N = 123). We focused on punishment behaviour in response to ostensibly real moral transgressions, rather than punishment recommendations for hypothetical moral transgressions. We employed moral scenarios involving disloyalty (group-focused moral domain) and unfairness (individual-focused moral domain). Regarding punishment affective states, on average, children did not derive much enjoyment from administering punishment, nor did they anticipate that punishment would feel good. Thus, children did not make the same emotional forecasting error adults commonly commit. Regarding the cognitive integration of outcomes and intentions, children began to punish failed intentional transgressions more harshly than accidental transgression, in both disloyalty and unfairness scenarios, much earlier than in previous behavioural studies: around 7 years of age rather than in late adolescence. This could be due to the lower processing demands and higher intention salience of our paradigm. Exploratory analyses revealed that children showed higher concern for disloyalty than unfairness. Punishment of disloyalty remained relatively stable in severity with increasing age, while punishment of unfairness decreased in severity. This suggests that the relative importance of moral concerns for the individual vs. the group may shift because of culture-directed learning processes.

People are more forgiving towards harmful inaction (omission) over harmful action (commission), even when the eventual outcome is identical-known as omission bias. This phenomenon is observed in a set of moral vignettes by Young et al. that was originally designed to investigate moral judgement based on the presence of harmful intent and outcome. However, studies that used this set of vignettes have never reported the "action/omission" distinction effect, thus overlooking or conflating the impact of omission bias and potentially complicating the understanding of the targeted moral construct. In this report, we demonstrate how this omission bias may have inadvertently been incorporated into Young et al. vignettes. We analysed data from two published studies by separating the values of each moral measure into action and omission, and included them as an additional two-level factor into the model used in each included study. Overall, our results revealed statistically significant effect of omission bias. Interestingly, this effect was observed only in explicit but not implicit measures (i.e., implicit association test (IAT)), though both measures were able to capture their intended effect of "intent-outcome"-based moral reasoning. Furthermore, this report offers preliminary insights into how the action-omission asymmetry relates to intent-outcome-based moral reasoning across various categories of moral judgement, suggesting avenues for future exploration.

Mentalizing involves a number of psychological processes designed to appraise self and others from different points of view. Factors affecting the flexibility in the ability to switch between self-other representations and perspectives remain yet unclear. In this study, we sought to (a) assess individual variability in processing and switching between self and other-oriented mental representations and perspectives in a sample of typically developing youths and (b) examine how age and executive functioning may affect this switching process. A total of 88 adolescents and 163 young adults completed the Self-Other Switching Task, a new computerised personality trait attribution paradigm. Measures of sustained attention, working memory, and inhibition were used to assess executive functioning. Linear mixed models showed that participants were faster at making attributions from the self-perspective and when referring to the self. They were also slower to disengage/switch from the self-perspective and the self-representation. Whereas there were no age differences in self-other switching efficiency per se, adolescents were slower than adults on trials involving appraisals of the other from the self-perspective. Importantly, higher verbal working memory scores were associated with better performance on incongruent trials and with switching scores. This study demonstrates the utility of a new experimental task permitting to tease apart the effects of self-other appraisal and perspective switching within a single paradigm. Our behavioural results highlight a self-cost observed in switching between representations and perspectives and emphasise the roles of age and working memory in the simultaneous processing of self- and other-oriented information.

A crucial aspect of human memory concerns the ability to retrieve analogous situations whose individual objects do not resemble those of the cues (distant analogues). Recent studies using a cued-recall paradigm suggest that distant analogues are more frequently retrieved than disanalogous situations that maintain a small set of object similarities with the cues (objects-only (OO) matches). In the first experiment of the present study, one condition had a distant analogue compete in long-term memory with an OO match involving a higher number of object similarities than in prior research. In another condition, the distant analogue competed in memory with a situation whose individual objects and first-order relations resembled those of the target (R+O matches) but yielded partial structural similarities that were insufficient for projecting meaningful inferences. Experiment 2 replicated this procedure with distant analogues whose similarity with the target only became apparent at higher levels of abstraction. In both experiments, retrieval rates of distant analogues were similar to those of OO matches, lower than those of R+O matches, and lower when competing against R+O matches than against OO matches. These results bear important implications for the current debate about the adequacy of our memory systems for the prospects of analogical transfer.

In everyday life, when we have to formulate judgements, we often end up being influenced by information that is not directly related to the matter at hand. This happens both when we encounter the person in the real-life world, but also in the cyber-world, when, for example, we use social networks. In both cases, indeed, based simply on a few images or short stories, we may start to believe fake news or judge someone by generalising limited information to the overall judgement of that person/situation, as it happens in the halo effect. Even moral assessment can be influenced by limited, non-moral information; however, little is known on how this influence can affect our moral inferences about someone's virtues. We conduct three experiments, in which we assess how aspects non-directly connected to moral information, such as looks or fortuitous events, can affect our judgement about someone's morality. The experiments focus on the use of very limited information (e.g., attractiveness and/or short anecdotes), to reproduce the typical information available on a social network (e.g., people post selfies, or brief personal stories about their thoughts and feelings, or brief descriptions of personal events). In all experiments, the participants were asked to judge the moral virtues (honesty, courage, wisdom, and hope) of the person in the picture/narrative. Results show that pictures and narratives significantly affect the judgement of virtues. Moreover, the third experiment reveals a combined effect, by enhancing the influence of non-moral aspects on evaluation of someone's moral dispositions.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing became prominent or required worldwide as a predominant preventive strategy up until and even after vaccines became widely available. Because masks make emotion recognition more challenging for both the face and voice, medical and behavioural/mental health providers became aware of the disruptions this generated in practitioner-patient relationships. The current set of studies utilised two adult samples, first from United States college students (N = 516) and second from the U.S. American general public (N = 115), to document the severity and types of errors in facial expression recognition that were exacerbated by medical mask occlusion. Using a within-subjects experimental design and a well-validated test of emotion recognition that incorporated multiethnic adult facial stimuli, both studies found that happy, sad, and angry faces were significantly more difficult to interpret with masks than without, with lesser effects for fear. Both high- and low-intensity emotions were more difficult to interpret with masks, with a greater relative change for high-intensity emotions. The implications of these findings for medical and behavioural/mental health practitioners are briefly described, with emphasis on strategies that can be taken to mitigate the impact in health care settings.

People often cannot remember the source of their memories despite recalling other elements of a remembered event correctly. Observation inflation is one such error of source monitoring. It refers to remembering the actions of another agent as self-performed. While the existence of this memory error is well documented, it is not clear how it relates to other errors of source attribution: It is not evident whether the phenomenon reflects (1) a specific tendency to appropriate the actions of other agents, (2) a general confusion of sources with overlapping features, or (3) whether it is a confound induced by the complex structure of the conventionally used experimental paradigm. We conducted two online experiments to assess these potential contributions to observation inflation. Crucially, administering a full source monitoring test revealed a symmetrical pattern: Recognising other's actions as one's own occurred at the same rate as misattributing one's own actions to another agent. The findings resonate with source-monitoring frameworks by suggesting that source attribution errors arise due to the similarity of the sources, whereas the evidence speaks against a special status for appropriating observed actions.

Studies on eye movements during reading have primarily focussed on the processing of content words (CWs), such as verbs and nouns. Those few studies that have analysed eye movements on function words (FWs), such as articles and prepositions, have reported that FWs are typically skipped more often and, when fixated, receive fewer and shorter fixations than CWs. However, those studies were often conducted in languages where FWs contain comparatively little information (e.g., the in English). In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), FWs can carry gender and number marking. In the present study, we analysed data from the RASTROS corpus of natural reading in BP and examined the effects of word length, predictability, frequency and word class on eye movements. Very limited differences between FWs and CWs were observed mostly restricted to the skipping rates of short words, such that FWs were skipped more often than CWs. For fixation times, differences were either nonexistent or restricted to atypical FWs, such as low frequency FWs, warranting further research. As such, our results are more compatible with studies showing limited or no differences in processing speed between FWs and CWs when influences of word length, frequency and predictability are taken into account.

People learn new words in narrative contexts, but little is known about how the emotional valence of the narrative influences word learning. In a pre-registered experiment, 76 English-speaking adults read 30 novel adjectives embedded in 60 short narratives (20 positive, 20 negative, and 20 neutral valence). Both immediately after and 24 hr later, participants completed a series of post-tests, including speeded recognition, sentence completion, meaning generation, and valence judgement. Results showed that participants learned both the novel word form and its meaning. Compared with novel words experienced in the neutral contexts, those read in the emotional contexts (both positive and negative) showed better learning of orthographic form in the immediate post-test, but only those read in the negative context were recognised with greater accuracy in the delayed post-test. Furthermore, the valence of the context was reflected in the word meanings participants generated for each novel word, suggesting that word valence can be inferred from the valence of the contexts. Results from sentence completion and valence judgement were mixed, depending on the task demands. These findings are discussed with reference to theories of affective embodiment and the implications for learning abstract words are considered.