Psychological Research-Psychologische Forschung最新文献

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder resulting in impaired pitch perception and memory. Here we investigated whether participants with congenital amusia have deficits in temporal processing of auditory information, in addition to pitch processing deficits. Individuals with amusia (n = 19) and matched controls (n = 21) were presented with sequences of five tones in which one tone was sometimes shifted in pitch or in time, and we adaptively assessed psychophysical thresholds for detecting these shifts. Pitch thresholds of the amusia group were higher (i.e., worse) than those of the control group as expected, and, crucially, time thresholds were too, although the group difference for time thresholds was smaller. Across participants, time thresholds correlated with pitch thresholds. Principal component analysis revealed that all pitch- and time-related variables (thresholds and amusia battery scores) were correlated to one component that also distinguished between amusics and controls; whereas a second component captured additional variability on the time task. Simulations suggest that prior studies had not found these time processing deficits because they had less statistical power, likely due to smaller sample sizes. The observed time processing deficit is in agreement with amusic individuals' subjective reports about their difficulties following the rhythm of the music. These data suggest that amusia deficits are not restricted to pitch, but extend to the time domain, yet with a smaller effect size, and at least when the stimuli have a clear pitch content, such as for tone sequences or music.

Internal bodily sensations such as an empty rumbling stomach can lead to enhanced desire for food - hunger. As an empty rumbling stomach is caused by digestive physiology, it is often presumed that such physiological processes also cause hunger. However, psychological processes could equally generate hunger (e.g., based on what the physiological signal has come to connote), and here we outline a method to test this idea. Participants were exposed to a stomach rumbling sound and control conditions (machine sound and silence) while they viewed pictures of food and everyday objects. For each picture, participants evaluated their desire to consume or own it, and judged, if there was a sound, where they felt it came from. Over half the participants experienced an illusion in which they mis-localised the stomach rumble sound to their own body. These participants also judged the pictures of food to be more desirable than comparable food pictures in the control conditions. This effect was obtained irrespective of when they had last eaten. Relative to control conditions, the stomach rumble sound had little impact on desire for pictures of everyday objects. These findings suggest it is possible to generate an illusory interoceptive state independent of physiology, which can then enhance desire to eat. This implies that purely psychological processes can generate bodily-cued desires.

The ability to detect small errors between sensory prediction in the brain and actual sensory feedback is important in rehabilitation after brain injury, where motor function needs to be restored. To date in the recent study, a delayed visual error detection task during upper limb movement was used to measure this ability for healthy participants or patients. However, this ability during walking, which is the most sought-after in brain-injured patients, was unclear. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of walking parameters, the sense of body heaviness, and delayed error detection rate in a visual feedback delay experiment during treadmill walking for healthy participants. It was also unclear how sagittal or frontal feedback during walking, which is commonly used clinically, affects the error detection task. Therefore, another purpose of the study was to investigate whether each outcome was modulated by different observation viewpoints. We found that walking parameters (step time and stride time), sense of body heaviness, and incongruence detection rate were increasing with delay time and that these data did not depend on the observation viewpoints. In the future, this study will provide an important cue to develop the methods that assess the sensory-motor integration function of patients during walking.

The existence of free will has been called into question by Benjamin Libet's seminal experiment, who argued that our conscious decision is preceded by an unconscious decision reflected in the readiness potential (RP). Alternatively, it has been argue that the RP rather reflects a decision process in which different signals accumulate until they reach the intention threshold, at which point an agent experience their intention simultaneously. This raises the question what type of signal is accumulated given that no external information is provided. Recent studies suggest that various interoceptive signals, such as the respiratory and cardiac cycles, guide our arbitrary decisions. We hypothesized the somatosensory feedback from the afferent system could be another potential source, and tested this by inducing numbness in participants' hands. If somatosensory feedback is one source of information in arbitrary decisions, participants should take longer to reach the decision threshold. Contrary to our hypotheses, Bayesian analyses revealed decisive evidence supporting the null hypothesis. These findings suggest that somatosensory feedback may not substantially contribute to arbitrary decisions, and alternative explanations have been proposed to account for the results.

Generative activity can interfere with later retrieval of related concepts and words. This semantic interference has been ascribed to long-term adaptive learning mechanisms that promote access to selected representations and hinder access to coactivated competitors. Some accounts in the memory literature posit that the punishment doled out to coactivated competitors may actually serve as a catalyst for more robust relearning in comparison to never-punished controls. The present work investigates whether this claim also applies to lexical access by assessing how adaptive learning processes unfold during generation of taxonomically related words in each phase of a modified retrieval practice and relearning design. In each phase, there was cumulative semantic interference across category member ordinal position, demonstrating that interference accrues with each related retrieval. The final assessment phase showed persistent semantic interference in the absence of relearning, but naming was equivalent for activated and control conditions that were subjected to relearning. These results provide a detailed window into the temporal dynamics of learning and relearning in conceptual-lexical access but suggest that enhanced relearning chiefly applies to novel learning episodes and not well learned conceptual-lexical links.

Social exclusion has been found to impair inhibitory control and working memory, but its effect on directed forgetting has remained largely unexplored. Using the item-method directed forgetting paradigm, the present study employed both verbal and pictorial materials to investigate how social exclusion affects the directed forgetting of social and non-social information. In Experiment 1, 54 participants (M_age = 23.87 years, SD = 2.80) were randomly assigned to either the exclusion group (n = 26) or the inclusion group (n = 28). In Experiment 2, 56 participants (M_age = 19.63 years, SD = 2.67) were recruited, including 27 in the exclusion group and 29 in the inclusion group. Results indicated that the directed forgetting effect was significantly reduced in the exclusion group compared to the inclusion group. The impairing effect of social exclusion was more pronounced for social information than for non-social information. Furthermore, the directed forgetting effect was smaller for pictorial materials than for verbal ones. These findings suggest that social exclusion disrupts the directed forgetting process, and that social information presented as images exhibits a significant mnemonic advantage. This highlights the importance of the social context in the directed forgetting process and provides multidimensional evidence for a deeper understanding of the consequences of social exclusion.

The human visual system employs two complementary mechanisms-feature contrast enhancement and continuity maintenance-to effectively process extensive visual input. However, how these mechanisms interact to shape visual perception remains poorly understood. In this study, participants were asked to estimate the orientations of a serial of Gabor patches. Our results revealed two key perceptual biases: a cardinal bias, characterized by systematic deviations away from cardinal orientations (e.g., 0°), and serial dependence, where current estimates were attracted toward previously presented orientations. Notably, we found that the cumulative influence of cardinal bias across trials produced a repulsive history effect. When this effect was statistically removed from the estimation errors, the strength of serial dependence significantly increased. This suggests that while feature contrast enhancement and continuity maintenance generate opposing behavioral effects, they may share overlapping computational or neural processes. These mechanisms likely interact dynamically to refine and optimize visual perception. Moreover, our findings offer a robust methodological framework for isolating serial dependence effects, enabling future studies to more accurately quantify their role in perceptual decision-making. By disentangling these interacting biases, this work advances our understanding of how the visual system balances sensitivity to feature differences with the integration of perceptual history.

This study investigated whether psychological stress influences the directed forgetting (DF) effect for neutral and negative information. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) was adopted to induce acute stress. Subsequently, both the stress and control groups performed a modified directed forgetting (DF) task. Results showed that, (1) For both neutral and negative items, the recognition rate was higher for the to-be-remembered (TBR) items than for the to-be-forgotten (TBF) items, a typical DF effect in both groups. (2) A reduced DF effect was found for the negative items than for the neutral items in the stress group, but not in the control group. (3) Compared to the control group, a lower recognition performance of TBF items, as well as an enhanced DF effect, was found in the stress group for neutral items but not for negative items. These results demonstrated that acute psychological stress could facilitate the memory control process of neutral, but not negative information.

The significance of acquiring motor skills for daily activities and professional tasks is universally acknowledged. Two experiments were conducted to explore the impact of Self-Performed Task (SPT) and Experimenter-Performed Task (EPT) during both encoding and retrieval on the memory of dynamic sequential actions presented in videos. The first experiment, involving 48 participants, determined that SPT-encoding was more effective than EPT-encoding. The second experiment, with 60 participants, revealed a significant interaction between the encoding mode and the recognition mode. Notably, when with EPT-encoding, there was a significant difference in memory precision between the two recognition methods, with the EPT-recognition yielding better memory outcomes than the SPT-recognition. However, there was no significant difference in memory performance between the two recognition methods under the SPT-encoding conditions. Collectively, the findings of these experiments confirm the persistence of the enactment effect in the memory of dynamic and continuous actions, with some results also offering empirical support for both the two-component hypothesis and action encoding theory.