Journal of Cognition最新文献

"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.

Theories of Embodied and grounded cognition posit that knowledge retrieval is rooted in sensorimotor simulations of past experiences. Accordingly, individuals with diverse sensorimotor experiences may retrieve knowledge differently. Here, we asked whether and how congenital blind individuals remap the representation of vision-related verbs in the motor system. Participants memorized lists of phrases combining an object to an action-related ("to take a guitar"), vision-related ("to see a guitar"), or control verb ("to hear a guitar"). The lists were either learned with the hands at rest or behind their back. Results replicated previous findings showing that recall for action-related phrases was lower in both groups when they were learned with the hands behind the back. As expected, posture impacted the memory of vision-related phrases only in blind people, although in the opposite direction. These findings provide evidence for the sensorimotor grounding of knowledge and shed light on how blind individuals represent knowledge.

Memory for episodic associations declines with ageing due to decreased recollection abilities. Unitization-the encoding of multiple items as one integrated entity-has been shown to support familiarity-based retrieval that is independent of recollection and is relatively preserved in healthy ageing. Accordingly, unitization has been proposed as a promising strategy to attenuate age-related associative deficits, but evidence regarding its utility was lacking. The current study aimed to establish unitization as a viable mnemonic strategy. First, to ensure that unitization can attenuate the age-related associative deficit for initially unrelated materials, top-down unitization was used. Namely, participants were given an initially unrelated word pair in the context of either a definition which allows the words to be encoded as a unitized compound or a sentence in which the words are encoded as separate entities. Second, to ensure that unitization can be used as a self-initiated strategy, participants also completed the task by generating their own binding information (definitions/sentences). As expected, a unitization effect had emerged, such that associative memory was enhanced following definition encoding. However, this effect only occurred when binding information was provided. Additionally, a general memory advantage for the self-generation condition had emerged, but this was (generally) similar across unitization conditions and age groups. Taken together, the results show that unitization can be used as a mnemonic strategy under certain conditions, and highlight additional steps that should be taken before it can be effectively used beyond lab settings.

Daily, we perform activities in the presence of others (e.g., office work). While it's well-established that the mere presence of others can influence our performance, it is less clear whether others' performance, rather than just their presence, influences us. To address this, we replicated Desender et al.'s (2016) study, Is mental effort contagious?, and conducted a second experiment to follow up on our failure to replicate their findings. Desender et al. (2016) used a modified joint Simon task where two participants performed side by side. The manipulated participant completed an easy (mostly congruent trials) and a difficult (mostly incongruent trials) block, while the neutral participant completed two neutral blocks (equal proportion of congruent and incongruent trials). They found that the neutral participant mirrored the manipulated participants' mental effort, exerting more effort when the latter performed a difficult versus an easy task. In both Experiment 1 (exact replication; N = 176) and Experiment 2 (more demanding joint Simon task; N = 120), we failed to replicate this result even though the manipulated participants adjusted their mental effort as expected. We identified methodological explanations for this discrepancy in results, such as how conditions were counterbalanced in the original study, which likely produced carry-over effects, and limited visibility of participants' physiological cues. Moreover, the original study's effect vanished when re-analyzed with a more robust linear mixed model, suggesting their findings may not have been as reliable as initially thought. Our findings underscore the need for rigorous experimental designs and analyses in psychological research.

Processing word meaning often appears effortless, yet the language system must frequently resolve ambiguity by integrating broad contextual information to ensure comprehension. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the facilitation of global semantic context on word-meaning access remains a key challenge in cognitive neuroscience. In this study, we explore whether global semantic context -specifically, the thematic content of a visually presented short text- reduces the cognitive demands of word-meaning processing. Using pupillometry, we examined the contributions of context congruency and semantic ambiguity across two tasks: a word-association task (Experiment 1) and a semantic relatedness task (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, global context congruence biased word associations toward context-consistent meanings, and, crucially, this was accompanied by a reduction in pupil size, indicating reduced cognitive effort. Experiment 2 revealed faster and more accurate responses in context-congruent conditions, with a concurrent reduction in pupil size. Notably, the effects of global context on pupil dilation were amplified for more ambiguous words, highlighting an interaction between lexical ambiguity and contextual facilitation. These findings provide new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of context-to-word interactions and validate pupillometry as a sensitive marker of cognitive effort during word-meaning processing.

The pretesting effect suggests that attempting and failing to guess unknown information can improve memory compared to errorless study. A relevant question concerns the optimal timing for providing corrective feedback and administering the final test. This study explored two variables: (1) the timing of feedback after unsuccessful pretest attempts, either immediately or following a delay of 24 hours (Experiment 1) or 48 hours (Experiment 2); and (2) the timing of the final test after feedback, either immediately or after a 24-hour delay (Experiment 1). Recall accuracy was evaluated across these conditions and compared to an errorless (read-only) learning condition. The results showed that pretesting consistently yielded higher recall accuracy than the read-only condition. Immediate feedback was more effective than delayed feedback, and performance on the immediate test was superior to that of the delayed test. More importantly, the pretesting effect persisted even with delays in feedback and final testing. This flexibility in timing suggests practical applications, particularly in educational settings where immediate feedback or testing may not always be feasible.

Prior episodic long-term memory (LTM) can enhance working memory (WM) by improving recall of WM representations that match pre-learnt information and by freeing up capacity for new information. In this study, we investigated the flexibility of WM in doing so. Specifically, we tested whether WM can make use of pre-learnt item-item associations in a serial recall task, which typically requires the formation of item-positional bindings. We examined whether any benefits arise from accessing full episodic representations or from item activation, and assess whether the observed benefits are best explained by compression accounts during encoding (e.g., chunking, offloading) or by redintegration at test. Furthermore, we tested whether the benefits for pre-learnt and novel words depended on the position within the lists. Across three experiments, we consistently found that incorporating pre-learnt word pairs into a serial recall task facilitated immediate memory for words that matched pre-learnt representations - speaking against an item activation account. However, the benefit on new words within lists that included pre-learnt pairs depended on whether the words could be easily submitted to encoding strategies, such as chunking or offloading, which was facilitated by providing matching grouping structures during encoding. Overall, our results expand our understanding of how prior experiences can benefit WM processes, demonstrating that such benefits mainly result from the retrieval of prior episodes, rather than enhanced item activation in episodic memory.