Journal of Cognition最新文献

Word norming datasets have become an important resource for psycholinguistic research, and they are based on the underlying assumption that individual differences are inconsequential to the measurement of semantic dimensions. In this pre-registered study we tested this assumption by examining whether individual differences in motor imagery are related to variance in semantic ratings. We collected graspability ratings (i.e., how easily a word's referent can be grasped using one hand) for 350 words and also had each participant complete a series of motor imagery questionnaires. Using linear mixed effect models we tested whether measures of motor imagery ability (e.g., the Florida Praxis Imagery Questionnaire and the Test of Ability in Movement Imagery for Hands) and motor imagery vividness (e.g., the Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire 2) could account for variance (raw and absolute difference scores) in graspability ratings. We observed a significant relationship between motor imagery vividness and absolute rating difference scores, wherein people with more vivid motor imagery provided ratings that were further from the mean word ratings. However there was no relationship between motor imagery and raw rating difference scores. The results suggest that there are measurable systematic differences in how participants make sensorimotor semantic ratings, which has implications for how sensorimotor semantic word norms are used for investigations of lexical semantic processing.

People's understanding of topics and concepts such as risk, sustainability, and intelligence can be important for psychological researchers and policymakers alike. One underexplored way of accessing this information is to use free associations to map people's mental representations. In this tutorial, we describe how free association responses can be collected, processed, mapped, and compared across groups using the R package associatoR. We discuss study design choices and different approaches to uncovering the structure of mental representations using natural language processing, including the use of embeddings from large language models. We posit that free association analysis presents a powerful approach to revealing how people and machines represent key social and technological issues.

The dissociation between conscious and unconscious perception is one of the most relevant issues in the study of human cognition. While there is evidence suggesting that some stimuli might be unconsciously processed up to its meaning (e.g., high-level stimulus processing), some authors claim that most results on the processing of subliminal stimuli can be explained by a mixture of methodological artefacts and questionable assumptions about what can be considered non-conscious. Particularly, one of the most controversial topics involves the method by which the awareness of the stimuli is assessed. To address this question, we introduced an integrative approach to assess the extent to which masked hierarchical stimuli (i.e., global shapes composed of local elements) can be processed in the absence of awareness. We combined a priming task where participants had to report global or local shapes, with the use of subjective and objective awareness measures collected either in a separate block (offline), or trial-by-trial during the main task (online). The unconscious processing of the masked primes was then evaluated through two different novel model-based methods: a Bayesian and a General Recognition Theory modeling approach. Despite the high correlation between awareness measures, our results show that the use of alternative approaches based on different theoretical assumptions leads to diverging conclusions about the extent of the unconscious processing of the masked primes.

The question we addressed in the current study is whether the mere prospect of monetary reward gain affects subjective time perception. To test this question, we collected trial-based confidence reports in a task where participants made categorical decisions about probe durations relative to the reference duration. When there was a potential to gain a monetary reward, the duration was perceived to be longer than in the neutral condition. Confidence, which reflects the perceived probability of being correct, was higher in the reward gain condition than in the neutral condition. We found that confidence influences the sense of time in different participants. Participants with high confidence reported perceiving the duration signaled by the monetary gain condition longer than participants with low confidence. Our results showed that only high confidence individuals overestimated the context of monetary gain. Finally, we found a negative relationship between confidence and time perception, and that confidence bias at the maximum uncertainty duration of 450 ms is predictive of time perception. Taken together, the current study demonstrates that subjective measures of the confidence profile caused an overestimation of time rather than the outcome valence of reward expectancy.

This tutorial provides guidelines for conducting linear mixed effects (LME) analyses for simple designs, aimed at researchers familiar with t-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and linear regression. First, we compare LME analyses with traditional methods when participants are the only source of random variation. We show that LME analysis is more interesting as soon as you have more than one observation per participant per condition. The second section discusses studies where both participants and stimuli are used as sources of random variation, ensuring robust generalization beyond the specific stimuli tested. In our search for standardized effect sizes, we saw that partial eta squared is even less informative for LME than for ANOVA. We present eta squared within as an alternative, to be used in combination with the traditional measure eta squared (also in ANOVA). To facilitate implementation, we analyze toy datasets with R and jamovi. This tutorial gives researchers a good foundation for LME analyses of simple 2 × 2 designs and paves the way for tackling more complicated designs.

Visual working memory and verbal storage are often investigated independently of one another. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that naming visual stimuli can provide an advantage in performance during visual working memory tasks. On the other hand, there is also evidence that labeling could lead to biases in recall. Here, we present an exploratory investigation of verbal labels associated with the memorization of simple visuo-spatial stimuli, and how the use of these labels informs recall behavior of the same stimuli in a separate working memory task. English-speaking participants performed a working memory task with orientation and location stimuli, followed by a separate naming task featuring the same stimuli. We found a diverse set of labels employed frequently and with a consistent distribution across stimulus types, the stimulus space, and among participants. The use of individual spatial words, predicted class 1 cardinal biases in memory (i.e. the observation that cardinal stimuli are more accurately recalled than non-cardinal ones). Conversely, words expressing uncertainty (e.g. 'slightly', 'near') predicted class 2 cardinal bias (i.e. recall biases away from the cardinal planes). This relationship between word use and recall biases is consistent with shared representational resources that are used for both visuo-spatial and verbal working memory.

Despite pictures being static representations, they use various cues to suggest dynamic motion. To investigate the effectiveness of different motion cues in conveying speed in static images, we conducted 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared subjective speed ratings given for motion lines trailing behind movers, suppletion lines replacing parts of the movers and backfixing lines set in the background against the baseline of having no extra cue. Experiment 2 was a replication of the first experiment with an addition of several motion lines considering the effect of quantity on conveyed speed. Experiment 3 then examined the actual time assessments of each cue and bare objects indicated for movers to complete their paths. Our results showed that motion cues vary in their effectiveness in depicting speed, with some influence from proficiency in reading manga. Motion lines, which index the path being traversed, remained less effective than suppletion and backfixing lines, which we argue encode the speed component of motion rather than directionality. However, adding more motion lines intensified the perceived speed of the movers. These static cues also influenced the actual time durations individuals indicated for fictitious motion events, in line with the subjective speed ratings. Altogether, our results suggest that different aspects of motion can be captured by different cues, and that the effectiveness of cues might be modulated by exposure to such patterns, in line with the premises of a visual lexicon view.

Can one shift attention among voices at a cocktail party during a silent pause? Researchers have required participants to attend to one of two simultaneous voices - cued by its gender or location. Switching the target gender or location has resulted in a performance 'switch cost' - which was recently shown to reduce with preparation when a gender cue was presented in advance. The current study asks if preparation for a switch is also effective when a voice is selected by location. We displayed a word or image 50/800/1400 ms before the onset of two simultaneous dichotic (male and female) voices to indicate whether participants should classify as odd/even the number spoken by the voice on the left or on the right; in another condition, we used gender cues. Preparation reduced the switch cost in both spatial-and gender-cueing conditions. Performance was better when each voice was heard on the same side as on the preceding trial, suggesting 'binding' of non-spatial and spatial voice features - but this did not materially influence the reduction in switch cost with preparation, indicating that preparatory attentional shifts can be effective within a single (task-relevant) dimension. We also asked whether words or pictures are more effective for cueing a voice. Picture cues resulted in better performance than word cues, especially when the interval between the cue and the stimulus was short, suggesting that (presumably phonological) processes involved in the recognition of the word cue interfered with the (near) concurrent encoding of the target voice's speech.

The standard explanation of meta-analogical transfer posits that the predicate mappings generated during a first analogy episode get reused during subsequent instances of analogical reasoning. As this account fails to predict the empirical result that only mappings between similar concepts get reliably transferred, other psychological mechanisms seem to be at play. Across three experiments, we obtained evidence suggesting that the carry-over of visuo-spatial schemas can also be involved in meta-analogical transfer. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated solutions to an ambiguous letter-string analogy whose alternative solutions involved different visuospatial operations. Prior to that, participants rated solutions to letter-string analogies aimed to elicit visuospatial operations that were either consistent, inconsistent or unrelated to the visuospatial operations underlying the later problem. Participants granted higher scores to solutions whose underlying visuospatial operations matched those elicited by the preparatory analogies. In Experiment 3, participants rated solutions to the target ambiguous analogies after watching short animations representing the visuospatial representations presumed to have been elicited by the preparatory analogies of Experiments 1 and 2. The fact that these animations biased participants' ratings in the same manner as in the previous experiments provides further evidence that dynamic visuo-spatial schemas can play a role in meta-analogical transfer.

Anyone recounting the history of cognitive psychology will have to make early mention of the study of orthographic processing (starting in 1886 with the seminal work of Cattell, a doctoral student of Wilhelm Wundt); and anyone recounting the study of orthographic processing will have to make mention of Jonathan Grainger. An honorary member and former president of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Jonathan has dedicated nearly four decades of research to the mechanisms driving the recognition of letters, words and sentences during reading. In honour of Jonathan's career-which formally has come to a close in 2023-in this Special Issue several contemporaries and close collaborators highlight important advances that have been made in the past 40 years, and provide flavours of where the field stands today.