Cognitive Research-Principles and Implications最新文献

When navigating individuals form mental representations of their environment. Significant individual differences exist, particularly in the ability to develop survey knowledge-a map-like understanding of spatial relationships. While many studies have focused on navigation via predetermined routes, less is known about individual differences in learning environments from free exploration. This study investigated whether exploration behaviors, such as the tendency to revisit places or diffuse in the environment, are linked to mental representations and whether visuospatial factors, like visuospatial working memory and self-reported wayfinding inclinations (e.g., self-efficacy and pleasure in exploring, and spatial anxiety), contribute to these relationships. A sample of 234 participants (147 womencompleted a visuospatial working memory task and wayfinding questionnaires, then freely explored a virtual city in a CAVE environment. Revisiting (tendency to re-explore visited areas) and diffusion (extent of environmental coverage) were calculated. Their survey knowledge was assessed using a map drawing task. The results showed that exploration behaviors were related to individual differences: women exhibited less revisiting and diffusion than men; higher self-efficacy and pleasure in exploring were associated with reduced revisiting; and joystick familiarity favoured diffusion. Furthermore, exploration behaviors mediated the relationship between gender and self-efficacy and pleasure in exploring with map accuracy. Map drawing was also directly predicted by visuospatial working memory ability. These findings offer insights into the role of individual differences in exploration behaviors and their relationship to survey knowledge gained from free exploration, highlighting the importance of individual factors in how environments are experienced and processed.Significance statementSome people are better at understanding where landmarks are in a place and how they are connected, while others find it more difficult. This paper investigates whether the way we move through an environment (how we explore) relates to this ability, along with other personal factors. When exploring a city, some people move around a lot, while others stay closer to familiar areas. We found that this is related to how well people understand the layout of the place. Importantly, we also found that personal attitudes toward orientation matter: people who feel more confident and enjoy exploring tend to revisit places less. On the other hand, the ability to mentally handle visual and spatial information (visuospatial working memory) doesn't change how we explore, but it does help us build a better understanding of the environment. Gender and familiarity with using a joystick also related to how people explored and what they learned. By studying how people move and how this relates to their individual characteristics, we can better understand how we learn about the environments.

The pristine conditions hypothesis postulates that highly confident witnesses will be highly accurate, even when witnessing conditions are poor. Recent research has extended this to children and concluded that, on average, child-eyewitnesses who are highly confident are rather accurate (i.e., 85-97%, Winsor et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 150:2387-2407, 2021). However, this has only been tested in good witnessing conditions. Since then, research in adults has shown that, in some poor witnessing conditions, the high confidence-accuracy relationship breaks down. We sought to determine if highly confident child and adult eyewitnesses would be highly accurate even in poor witnessing conditions. We presented 1,055 participants (485 young children, 357 older children, and 213 adults) with a 360-degree live-action mock-crime video in a virtual reality headset. To test whether witnessing conditions impact children's confidence-accuracy relationship, we manipulated exposure duration (short-6 s, long-34 s) at encoding and the presence of the culprit in the lineup identification task. Surprisingly, memory strength was weak for all age groups under good and poor witnessing conditions. There were so few high confidence identifications in adults that the confidence-accuracy relationship could not be plotted. Importantly, we found that the pristine conditions hypothesis does not hold regardless of the state of the witnessing condition. This research suggests that there are boundary conditions to the pristine conditions hypothesis and that further research is needed to determine the boundary conditions of the pristine conditions hypothesis.

Number transcoding, the ability to convert digits to words and vice versa, is a critical skill in mathematical literacy and in everyday life. While transcoding is known to be difficult for children, it is unclear whether it challenges adults too, and if so, what the source of that difficulty is. Here, we analyzed the number reading performance of 172 neurotypical adults. Their mean error rate was 6.5%, considerably higher than that typically observed in word-reading tasks, indicating that transcoding is a relatively challenging task even in adulthood. To investigate the cognitive origin of this difficulty, we examined the error types produced by these participants, as well as by a second group of 51 adults with a number-reading deficit (dysnumeria, mean error rate of 28.7%). In both groups, most errors reflected corruptions of the number's syntactic structure. Moreover, among adults with dysnumeria, the most common subtype was syntactic dysnumeria. These findings indicate that, as in children, the primary challenge in adult number reading lies in the processing of the number's syntactic structure.

The current survey measured students' knowledge, use, and perceived effectiveness of different learning strategies. Whereas a common assumption from previous research is that students forego using effective strategies because they lack awareness of them, the current results demonstrate that students are quite aware of certain strategies such as retrieval practice, spacing, and explaining, but are less aware of other strategies like pretesting and interleaving, and seem to overrate the effectiveness of highlighting and rereading notes. Even when students were aware of effective learning strategies, their primary reasons for not using them were the cognitive costs associated with them (time, effort, anxiety, and increased planning and preparation). Students reported teachers, friends, and self-discovery as the most common sources of learning about both effective and ineffective strategies, and published research as the least common source. We discuss the implications of these results for designing interventions aimed at improving students' self-regulated learning decisions.

Aviation selection tests are high-stakes assessments designed to identify candidates capable of succeeding in demanding flight environments. Most branches of the US military incorporate both content-based and process-based assessments to evaluate prior knowledge and reasoning ability, respectively. A challenge with high-stakes process tests is that their validity requires participant naivety, which is increasingly difficult to maintain in the modern internet era. As such, these high-stakes tests must be continuously evaluated to ensure the most valid, reliable, and cost-effective selection procedures are employed. To address this, we examined practice effects in the psychomotor airplane tracking tasks of the Navy's Aviation Selection Test Battery (ASTB). We had 146 Naval Flight Students and 119 enlisted Sailors perform the ASTB's psychomotor battery six times across two days. Results revealed large practice effects, shifting in rank ordering of individuals across attempts, and that psychomotor performance had not stabilized even by the sixth attempt. Prior action video gaming and flight simulator gaming experience correlated with psychomotor performance, with some evidence that improvements were related, albeit weakly, to either gaming experience or initial performance. Finally, correlations between psychomotor performance and eventual naval flight training scores were stable across the six attempts, but simulations indicated predictive validity can range widely if participants have differing levels of practice from one another. Overall, these findings indicate that the psychomotor component of the ASTB is a valuable inclusion to the Naval Flight School selection process but also could benefit from further refinement.

Listening to background music while engaging in mental tasks is a popular habit. Despite the diverse playlists conceived for this purpose, the optimal sonic energy (calming vs. arousing) of a musical excerpt that may benefit cognitive performances remains poorly understood, particularly in relation to the specific demands of the task. To clarify this issue, we asked participants to perform an Attention Network Test and a phonemic Verbal Fluency Task, in silence and while listening to low- and high-arousing unfamiliar musical excerpts. Excerpts sonic energy was determined by musical features analysis, followed by a subjective evaluation of the excerpts' arousal potential. Behavioral, physiological and subjective measures were collected. Results showed that the presence of both the low- and high-arousing music increased physiological activation and enhanced the pleasure experienced during task execution. Behavioral findings revealed beneficial effects of background music on executive control-related attentional abilities and word production fluidity across time. Finally, participants experienced more cognitive effort during the attentional task with the high-arousing excerpt, while no differences were observed in the Verbal Fluency Task. These findings highlight the importance of tailoring background music sonic energy to the demands of the task in order to mobilize resources and enhance enjoyment without disrupting cognitive performances.

To face ecological disasters, one of the major emergencies of modern times, fostering pro-environmental behaviors appears crucial. While research explored various behavioral drivers, few studies addressed the conceptual representation of ecological events at different ages. Our preregistered study fills this gap, examining how different generations conceptualize ecology, considering evidence suggesting a link between climate change abstractness and willingness to act pro-environmentally. Older (> 65 yo) and younger (18-35 yo) individuals performed multiple tasks targeting conceptual processing (categorization), semantic organization (rating), and conceptual representation (feature generation) of ecological (e.g., deforestation) compared to concrete (e.g., spoon) and abstract (e.g., affirmation) concepts. In the categorization task, participants responded to critical ecological, concrete, and abstract words but refrained from responding to animal words. The rating task involved evaluating critical words on semantic aspects (e.g., Abstractness, Familiarity), and the feature generation task listing properties true for each concept. Innovatively, participants were tested in three possible settings (indoor, natural outdoor, urbanized outdoor) to test whether exposure to nature impacts categorization.Results showed that independent from the setting, ecological concepts were similar to abstract concepts, especially in semantic organization and conceptual representation, or more abstractly characterized than them, especially in conceptual processing. Age differences were minimal, but older adults, who showed more positive attitudes toward ecology and nature, characterized ecological concepts more concretely than younger adults.Theoretically, the multifarious characterization of ecological phenomena supports the flexibility of our conceptual system and points to the necessity of overcoming the classical concrete-abstract dichotomy and studying concepts in a more "situated" manner. From a societal point of view, the age-dependent abstractness of ecological concepts might inform policies on how to improve climate change campaigns, tailoring them to different age groups.

Associative memory deteriorates with age. One possible reason for this associative memory deficit in older adults is a decline in inhibitory function. However, it remains unclear what role of inhibitory function plays in age-related associative memory deficits, and whether and how acute training of inhibitory function could ameliorate the detrimental effects of inhibitory deficits on associative memory in older adults. In Experiment 1, 80 participants (40 younger and 40 older adults) studied scene-word pairs while attempting to inhibit interfering words during encoding, with two conditions: gist and non-gist interferences. In Experiment 2, 66 older adults were randomly assigned to either acute inhibitory training or a control group, and eye-tracking technology was used to capture the benefits of acute inhibitory training. Results showed that older adults were more disturbed by gist than non-gist interferences because of hyper-binding, and that inhibitory function mediated the relationship between age and associative memory accuracy. Notably, although acute inhibitory training did not significantly improve associative memory accuracy in the training group compared to the control group, structural equation model showed that older adults in the acute training group showed shorter fixation durations and lower frequencies in the interference region of interest, leading to better associative memory. These results indicate that inhibitory function plays a mediating role in age-related associative memory decline, as well as its plasticity in this association. It provides a potential pathway to improve associative memory in older adults.

Submariners must interpret SONAR data and make rapid tactical decisions under challenging conditions. The broadband time-bearing plot is a common visualisation method which requires mental spatial transformations to generate an actionable representation. Participants (N = 81) were trained on a VR scenario that required them to spatially localize an enemy vessel indicated on a time-bearing plot. In the supported condition, participants were given access to a novel egocentric, conformal display, which wrapped the time-bearing plot around the user's field of view. The unsupported group received no assistance. Compared to a baseline unsupported condition, we found that the VR overlay markedly improved both speed and accuracy. Test performance revealed over-reliance in the supported group, but this phenomenon varied notably between participants. Those who jointly used the initial time-bearing plot and the conformal aid during training showed good performance with the aid, and no cost of prior exposure at test. Comprehension of SONAR data can be aided by novel display formats, but care must be taken to avoid over-reliance.