Journal of Cognition最新文献

Humans are strategic animals. We constantly make prospective choices, allocating limited resources in situations of uncertain, future outcomes. The management of our finite monthly budget, financial investments, or the allocation of time to the different questions in an exam are just a few examples. In these scenarios, both decision-making and resource allocation tend to fluctuate over time even under invariable set of constraints. However, it is unclear whether these fluctuations affect performance and whether they underlie additional objectives beyond pure reward maximisation. We address these questions using the breadth-depth dilemma, a novel ecological protocol where participants engage in sequential multiple-choice scenarios characterised by limited capacity. We designed two experimental environments. In one environment, optimal performance, formalised with an ideal allocator model, is associated with homogeneous resource allocation across consecutive choices. In contrast, the other environment entails that fluctuating resource allocation leads to greater expected rewards. Our study evaluates participants' adherence to these scenarios and measures fluctuations as deviation from homogeneous allocations. The results revealed that participants' behaviour fluctuates more than optimal, but critically, behavioural fluctuations adapt to the available capacity and the environmental context. Moreover, our findings unveil pronounced sequential strategies, such as save-for-later and reward history-dependent choice, further implying that these strategies contribute to decision variability. An extension of the optimal allocator model demonstrates that the characteristic excess fluctuations facilitate better-informed future choices (information gain), reduce uncertainty (risk avoidance), and generate diverse potential strategies (entropy seeking). Although having a modest impact on performance, these strategies may reflect advantageous behaviours in the long run under ever changing real-world environments.

Individuals vary substantially in their language skills. The Individual Differences in Language Skills Test Battery (IDLaS) is a tool to assess variability in (1) linguistic experience, (2) general cognitive skills implicated in language, including nonverbal processing speed, working memory, and nonverbal reasoning, and (3) linguistic processing skills, including word- and sentence-level production and comprehension. The test battery was initially developed for Dutch language users. Building on this work, we recently developed a German version (IDLaS-DE). IDLaS-DE consists of 30 behavioral tests that have been validated in a large group of German speakers, aged between 18 and 30 years. In addition, we have developed a web platform that researchers interested in assessing language and general cognitive skills can use for their research purposes. Here, we provide a guide for creating and running customized studies online via this platform. The IDLaS-DE web platform and all its services are free of charge and accessible at https://www.mpi.nl/idlas-de.

Singapore English is a dialect of English spoken by individuals living in Singapore, whose colloquial form (i.e., Singapore Colloquial English) contains unique lexical items not found in dominant dialects of English. The absence of these items from the lexicon of dominant English dialects indicates that lexical-semantic and affective norms central to psycholinguistic research do not exist for these Singapore English concepts, and it is unclear what is the specific influence of these effects when processing Singapore Colloquial English words. The present paper describes the development of valence, arousal, concreteness, and humor norms for a core vocabulary list of approximately 300 words and concepts, via human ratings and probing a Large Language Model, and evaluates the contribution of these norms to account for lexical processing performance in a visual lexical decision task. Results indicated that valence, arousal, and concreteness explained additional variance over and above orthographic similarity and word frequency in the visual lexical decision task. Specifically, Singapore English words that were more positively valenced, highly arousing, and more concrete, were responded to more rapidly and accurately. In addition, although there was generally a high convergence of valence, arousal, and concreteness ratings across human raters and the Large Language Model, humor norms were much less closely aligned. Overall, this paper provides a case study of how psycholinguistic research can be extended to diverse, understudied dialects of English, and showcases how doing so offers an opportunity for psycholinguistics to examine the importance of various lexical-semantic and affective measures to quantify lexical information in colloquial, informal language.

Features of word form (e.g., the vowel i as in meet) are associated with word meaning (e.g., positive valence), termed sound symbolism. Experimentally, sound symbolism is predominantly examined using pseudo-words. The present research employs a new experimental paradigm where participants are shown faces and are asked to choose a suitable name from memory for each face. In two experiments (total N = 399), we tested whether valence (manipulated via facial expressions, Experiment 1a, or likability, Experiment 1b) influences the occurrence of i-phonemes and o-phonemes in first names. To test convergent validity, a corpus analysis (Study 2) examined the association of likability and the occurrence of i-phonemes and o-phonemes using a representative corpus of German first names. Consistent with previous findings, names given to positively (vs. negatively) valenced faces more frequently contained i-phonemes, whereas, unexpectedly, valence did not influence o-phoneme occurrence. Thus, the naming paradigm bridges the gap between controlled pseudo-word experiments and the natural use of real names and can be employed to examine whether sound symbolic associations are stable enough to generalize to meaningful words.

Feeling of agency (FoA)-the experience of controlling one's actions and their outcomes-has been widely studied for bodily movements. Here, we investigated if microsaccades-small ballistic eye movements-are equally characterized by FoA and if intention mediates this sense of control. We measured FoA via intentional binding, a perceived compression between an action and its effect. In our experiments, we presented a vertically oriented grating, rendered invisible during stable fixation by a rapid temporal phase shift (>60 Hz) that became visible when its retinal motion was slowed down by a microsaccade (active condition). The stimulus was embedded in a clock face and observers reported perceived stimulus timing in each trial. Perceived timing of microsaccade-contingent stimulus perception was compared to the replay of a previous microsaccade's retinal consequence (replay condition). Trials without a stimulus were included as a control. To examine the role of intention, we tested this paradigm across two experiments in which observers were either instructed to saccade (intended microsaccades) or fixate (unintended microsaccades). In Experiment 2, no instruction was administered such that any microsaccades were considered spontaneous. Microsaccades-either actively generated or replayed-consistently rendered the stimulus highly visible compared to trials without such movements-provided microsaccade direction and peak velocity aligned with the stimulus's motion. Temporal estimates did not differ between the active and replay conditions for any microsaccade type. This result suggests the absence of temporal binding between eye movements and their sensory consequences, and that intention does not facilitate FoA for small eye movements.

Significance statement: Eye movements reflect our decision to closer inspect an aspect of the environment-bodily actions that align our perception with a preceding intention. Here, we investigated if microsaccades-a ballistic, minuscule type of saccade-can be characterized by a feeling of agency: the faint experience of affecting change through intentional actions. In two experiments, we presented an identical stimulus whose visibility was either gaze-contingent (active condition) or independent of eye movements (replay condition). In Experiment 1, we directly compared intended and unintended microsaccades and contrasted them with spontaneous microsaccades in Experiment 2. We found no difference between the active and replay condition for either eye movement type. Our data, hence, does not support feeling of agency for microsaccades. While it remains an open question if large saccades are characterized by feeling of agency, our finding demonstrates that intention is not sufficient to elicit feeling of agency for minuscule motor acts.

Perceptual disfluency, induced by blurring or difficult-to-read typefaces, can sometimes enhance memory retention, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate this effect, we manipulated blurring levels (clear, low-blur, high-blur) during encoding and assessed recognition performance in a surprise memory test. In Experiments 1A and 1B, response latencies from a lexical decision task were analyzed using ex-Gaussian distribution modeling and supplemented by drift diffusion modeling. Results showed that blurring differentially influenced parameters of the model, with high-blur affecting both early and late-stage processes, while low-blur primarily influenced early-stage processes. Recognition test results further revealed that high-blur words were remembered better than both clear and low-blurred words. Experiment 2 employed a semantic categorization task with a word frequency manipulation to further examine the locus of the perceptual disfluency effect. Similar to Experiments 1A and 1B, high-blur influenced both early and late-stage processes, while low-blur primarily affected early-stage processes. Low-frequency words exhibited greater shifting and skewing in distributional parameters, yet only high-frequency, highly blurred words demonstrated an enhanced memory effect. These findings suggest that both early and late cognitive processes contribute to the mnemonic benefits associated with perceptual disfluency. Overall, this study demonstrates that distributional and computational analyses provide powerful tools for dissecting encoding mechanisms and their effects on memory, offering valuable insights into models of perceptual disfluency.

"Thinking of" a representation in working memory is assumed to refresh its trace, boosting its accessibility. We previously demonstrated that think-of cues can be used to guide the refreshing of individual features in working memory (e.g., colors, orientations, words), with items refreshed more often being better reproduced in recall tasks. In the present study, we tested whether refreshing modulates the accessibility of multi-feature objects, contributing either to the maintenance of feature bindings or individual features. The "think-of" cues procedure was combined with a recognition task in Experiments 1 (N = 31) and 2 (N = 77) and with a dual-feature report task in Experiment 3 (N = 117). In all studies, participants encoded four colored shapes. During retention, a sequence of three think-of cues was presented, guiding refreshing of the memoranda 0, 1, or 2 times. In Experiments 1 and 2, a colored shape was presented for recognition (50% match and 50% mismatch). Critically, mismatch probes consisted of intrusions (new color with old shape or old color with new shape). Refreshing monotonically improved match-probe recognition, but not the rejection of intrusion probes. In Experiment 3, refreshing increased the correct recall of both features of the same object, whereas the probability of a single correct report remained constant. These results suggest that refreshing acted on the representation of the integrated object. Not refreshed objects, however, did not become more fragile to binding disruption, they mostly lost accessibility in an all-or-none fashion.

This report presents three behavioral experiments examining how different approaches of attentional prioritization influence distractor susceptibility in visual working memory (WM). We used three prioritization approaches: spontaneous, cued-based, and reward-based. In Experiments 1a and 1b, which involved spontaneous prioritization, we found that the distractor susceptibility of the last memory item - often assumed to be in the focus of attention - did not differ from that of other items in WM. In Experiment 2, cue-based prioritization was associated with reduced distractor susceptibility for the cued item, whereas reward-based prioritization showed no such effect for the highly-rewarded item, regardless of when the priority signal was presented (before, during, or after encoding). Thus, across these three experiments, prioritization was found to either reduce or have no effect on distractor susceptibility, but never to increase it. This dataset provides a basis for further investigation into the interaction between attention and interference in WM under different prioritization approaches.

Recent studies showed that the presence of the experimenter hinders executive functions. Belletier and Camos (2018) extended these findings to working memory, reporting a detrimental effect of the experimenter presence only when participants performed an aloud concurrent articulation during maintenance. Under such a condition, participants likely relied on an attentional maintenance mechanism rather that an articulatory mechanism, supporting the account of a capture of attention by the social presence. However, other results using the Stroop Task demonstrate an improvement on executive functions (Garcia-Marques & Fernandes, 2024, for a meta-analysis). Thus, the present study aimed at reassessing the impact of experimenter's presence reported by Belletier and Camos (2018) on a larger sample, with a within-subject manipulation of concurrent articulation, a variation in the secondary task, and the addition of another type of concurrent articulation. In the present study, participants alone or in the presence of the experimenter performed a Brown-Peterson task in which they maintained letters during a 12-second interval, during which they either stayed silent, uttered aloud, or whispered non-sense syllables. They had also to perform either no secondary task, a parity or a location judgement task. Results confirmed Belletier and Camos' (2018) findings, showing that the experimenter presence hindered memory performance when participants performed a secondary task under any type of concurrent articulation. A silent context or the absence of secondary task preserved recall from the effect of experimenter's presence.

Plausibility seems to play a key role in how well people remember the veracity of information. In a study by Vorms and colleagues (2022), an interaction pattern between statement plausibility and veracity feedback on memory performance appeared: Plausible statements were significantly more often correctly identified as true than correctly identified as false; for implausible statements, the descriptive trend was reversed. Given the importance of accurate memory for truth and falsity in real-world settings, it is crucial to understand the cognitive processes underlying this plausibility effect. For this purpose, we conducted a preregistered experiment in which participants studied four different statement types along with veracity feedback: plausible true, plausible false, implausible true, and implausible false. In a later recognition test, they indicated whether a statement was presented and, if so, what veracity feedback was displayed. We replicated the plausibility effect as an interaction between statement plausibility and veracity feedback on correct true/false attributions. Moreover, we analysed the data with a multinomial model to estimate the contribution of statement memory, feedback memory, and different guessing processes underlying the observable responses. These analyses revealed that guessing processes and statement memory accounted for the above-mentioned plausibility effect: Feedback guessing was influenced by corresponding statement plausibility, and statement memory was overall better when the veracity feedback aligned with statement plausibility. In contrast, feedback memory was enhanced in the case of a discrepancy between veracity feedback and statement plausibility. These results emphasise the importance of examining the processes driving the plausibility effect to derive correct conclusions.