Journal of Cognition最新文献

In the present exploratory study we investigate whether cognitive flexibility is a unitary mechanism underlying flexible behaviours across many domains or a domain-specific capacity. The literature on cognitive flexibility is divided into several research lines that do not converge. The most prominent one considers flexibility an executive function that represents the ability to switch among rules or tasks. In other research traditions it is associated with distinct components, such as the capacity to place an item into many categories (in creativity tests) or a characteristic of different cognitive or perceptual processes (e.g., flexible language use, flexibility in mathematics, perceptual flexibility). To determine whether flexibility in different domains relies on a general shared mechanism, 221 subjects from two countries (The United States and Romania, mean age 19.52 years) were tested online with several measurements from four different domains of investigation: language, mathematics, perception, and executive functions (specifically, set shifting). All tasks required some form of cognitive flexibility. In addition, we measured math anxiety to see how this relates to mathematical flexibility. The results show very few and small significant partial correlations among the tasks. They also highlight that there is no unitary overarching "executive" factor. The most prominent common factor was speed of processing for mathematical and language response times. Shifting does not seem to be a mechanism that underlies flexibility in all the investigated domains. While we acknowledge the need for replication of this study, the data suggest that the construct of shifting does not exhaust the notion of flexibility as it arises across cognitive domains.

Visual perspective taking (VPT) generates a shared frame of reference for understanding how the world appears to others. Whilst greater cognitive and neurophysiological demands are associated with increasing angular distance between the self and other is well documented, accompanying attentional characteristics are not currently understood. Furthermore, although age and group status have been shown to impact task performance, other important cues, such as the relationship between agents and objects, have not been manipulated. Therefore, 35 university students participated in an eye-tracking experiment where they completed a VPT task with agents positioned at a low or high angular disparity (45° or 135° respectively). The congruence between the age of the agent (child vs adult) and the object they are attending to (e.g., teddy-bear vs kettle) was also manipulated. Participants were required to respond to the direction of the object from the agent's position. The findings reveal more fixations and increased dwell-times on agents compared to objects, but this was moderated by the age of the task agent. Results also showed more attentional transitions between agents and objects at higher angular disparities. These results converge with behavioural and neurophysiological descriptions of task performance in previous studies. Furthermore, the congruency of the relationship between agents and objects also impacted attention shifting and response times, highlighting the importance of understanding how social cues and contexts can modulate VPT processes in everyday contexts and social interaction.

The inhibition of return effect in perception refers to the observation that one is slower to re-attend a location that was attended right before, compared to a location that was not attended right before. Johnson et al. (2013, Psych. Sc., 24, 1104-1112, doi:10.1177/0956797612466414) observed a similar inhibitory effect for an attended item in working memory, which the authors referred to as an inhibition-of-return-like effect. However, testing an inhibition of return effect requires attention to be disengaged from the attended item, before testing whether participants are slower to return to said item. This was assumed but not experimentally manipulated in the paradigm by Johnson and colleagues. In the current study, we investigated whether an inhibition of return effect can be observed in working memory when attention is experimentally disengaged from the attended item before measuring whether responses are slower for the item in question. Participants were indeed slower to respond to a memory probe that matched the item that was attended right before, compared to a memory probe that matched the item that was not attended right before. Thus, our test with more experimental control did result in an inhibition of return effect in working memory.

Assessing unconscious processing requires a valid measure of conscious perception. However, the two measures most commonly used, subjective reports and forced-choice discrimination, do not always converge: observers can discriminate stimuli rated as invisible better than chance. A debated issue is whether this phenomenon indicates that subjective reports of unawareness are contaminated by conscious perception, or that forced-choice discrimination performance is contaminated by unconscious processing. To address this question, we took advantage of a previously reported dissociation using masked response priming: for primes rated as invisible on a multi-point scale, response priming occurs only for fast trials, whereas for consciously perceived primes, response priming occurs across response times. Here, we replicated this dissociation, confirming that invisibility-reports were not contaminated by conscious perception. Crucially, we measured prime-discrimination performance within the same experiment and found above-chance performance for unseen primes. Together, these findings suggest that forced-choice discrimination performance is contaminated by unconscious processing.

Music making across cultures arguably involves a blend of innovation and adherence to established norms. This integration allows listeners to recognise a range of innovative, surprising, and functional elements in music, while also associating them to a certain tradition or style. In this light, musical creativity may be seen to involve the novel recombination of shared elements and rules, which can in itself give rise to new cultural conventions. Put simply, future norms rely on past knowledge and present action; this holds for music as it does for other cultural domains. A key process permeating this temporal transition, with regards to both music making and music listening, is prediction. Recent findings suggest that as we listen to music, our brain is constantly generating predictions based on prior knowledge acquired in a given enculturation context. Those predictions, in turn, can shape our appraisal of the music, in a continual perception-action loop. This dynamic process of predicting and calibrating expectations may enable shared musical realities, that is, sets of norms that are transmitted, with some modification, either vertically between generations of a given musical culture, or horizontally between peers of the same or different cultures. As music transforms through cultural evolution, so do the predictive models in our minds and the expectancy they give rise to, influenced by cultural exposure and individual experience. Thus, creativity and prediction are both fundamental and complementary to the transmission of cultural systems, including music, across generations and societies. For these reasons, prediction, creativity and cultural evolution were the central themes in a symposium we organised in 2022. The symposium aimed to study their interplay from an interdisciplinary perspective, guided by contemporary theories and methodologies. This special issue compiles research discussed during or inspired by that symposium, concluding with potential directions for the field of music cognition in that spirit.

A common finding across numerous response time (RT) paradigms is that the mean RT in one trial depends strongly on the characteristics of the immediately preceding trial. Although such sequential effects have usually only been considered within each single paradigm in isolation from the others, there are important similarities across paradigms between the theoretical accounts of these effects. However, so far there has been no systematic comparison of sequential effects across paradigms. To investigate the possible relationships between sequential effects in different paradigms, we conducted an experiment examining sequential effects in visual search, two-choice RT, interference, and task-switching paradigms, using methods designed to maximize the similarity of stimuli and responses across paradigms. Detailed analyses of the observed RT distributions were carried out using both descriptive (e.g., ex-Gaussian) and process-oriented (e.g., diffusion models) methods. The results reveal significant empirical similarities and differences between the sequential effects observed across different paradigms, and in some cases even across different conditions within a single paradigm. Furthermore, the sequential effects are more similar to one another for some pairs of paradigms than for others. These results imply that some cognitive processes eliciting sequential effects are shared across paradigms while others seem to be paradigm-specific.

Abstractionist models of visual word recognition can easily accommodate the absence of visual similarity effects in misspelled common words (e.g., viotin vs. viocin) during lexical decision tasks. However, these models fail to account for the sizable effects of visual similarity observed in misspelled brand names (e.g., anazon produces longer responses and more errors than atazon). Importantly, this dissociation has only been reported in separate experiments. Thus, a crucial experiment is necessary to simultaneously examine the role of visual similarity with misspelled common words and brand names. In the current experiment, participants performed a lexical decision task using both brand names and common words. Nonword foils were created by replacing visually similar letters (e.g., anazon [baseword: amazon], anarilllo [amarillo, yellow]) or visually dissimilar letters (e.g., atazon, atarillo). Results showed sizeable visual letter similarity effects for misspelled brand names in response times and percent error. Critically, these effects were absent for misspelled common words. The pervasiveness of visual similarity effects for misspelled brand names, even in the presence of common words, challenges purely abstractionist accounts of visual word recognition. Instead, these findings support instance-based and weakly abstractionist theories, suggesting that episodic traces in the mental lexicon may retain perceptual information, particularly when words are repeatedly presented in a similar format.

In this personal, and therefore highly selective, review article I summarize work performed in collaboration with numerous colleagues on how skilled adult readers perform identification tasks and speeded binary decision tasks involving single letters and visually presented words and sentences. The overarching aim is to highlight similarities in the processing performed at three key levels involved in written language comprehension (in languages that use an alphabetic script): letters, words, and sentences. The comparisons are made using behavioral data obtained with: i) speeded (response-limited) binary decision tasks; and ii) the effects of simultaneous surrounding context on letter and word identification using both data-limited (non-speeded) and response-limited procedures. I then propose a general framework that combines the three levels of processing, and that connects core processes at each level with the processing involved in tasks designed to reflect those core processes, and I end by suggesting possible avenues for future research with an aim to extend this general framework.

In recent years, a growing body of research uses Evidence Accumulation Models (EAMs) to study individual differences and group effects. This endeavor is challenging because fitting EAMs requires constraining one of the EAM parameters to be equal for all participants, which makes a strong and possibly unlikely assumption. Moreover, if this assumption is violated, differences or lack thereof may be wrongly found. To overcome this limitation, in this study, we introduce a new method that was originally suggested by van Maanen & Miletić (2021), which employs Bayesian hierarchical estimation. In this new method, we set the scale at the population level, thereby allowing for individual and group differences, which is realized by de facto fixing a population-level hyper-parameter through its priors. As proof of concept, we ran two successful parameter recovery studies using the Linear Ballistic Accumulation model. The results suggest that the new method can be reliably used to study individual and group differences using EAMs. We further show a case in which the new method reveals the true group differences whereas the classic method wrongly detects differences that are truly absent.

A quick and reliable test of vocabulary knowledge is a vital component of many studies looking at a range of language processing skills. Recent proliferation of online (web-based) research has generated a growing need for reliable open-access vocabulary tests that can be administered online. This data report presents the newly developed 30-item Web-based Open-access Reliable Decision on Synonyms (WORDS) English Vocabulary Test. In Experiment 1, we tested 109 participants (age range: 18-69 years) on an initial set of 51 potential multiple-choice test items in which participants read a target word (e.g., ubiquitous) and selected a (near-)synonym (e.g., omnipresent) from among three semantically unrelated foils (e.g., interpersonal, catatonic, voluminous). We conducted an item response theory analysis of participants' accuracy data to select an optimal subset of 30 items to include in the final version of the test. In Experiment 2, we verified the reliability of this 30-item version in a different sample (N = 121; 18-79 years); reliability (internal consistency) was good (Cronbach's α = 0.82). We confirmed that, consistent with numerous previous studies, (1) responses were more accurate and quicker for more frequent compared to less frequent words, and (2) older adults showed greater vocabulary knowledge compared to younger adults. The WORDS test takes on average 4 minutes (5 minutes 40 seconds including consent/debrief) to complete. It can be freely accessed via Gorilla Open Materials (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/694887), allowing ease of use and for useful comparisons between data collected by different researchers.