Psychological Research-Psychologische Forschung最新文献

The Stroop task has long been considered the optimal tool to estimate the efficiency of processes underlying individuals' abilities to suppress a distracting prepotent response, often assuming that performance in this task can be predictive of individuals' behavior in other contexts. The use of the Stroop task as a proxy for assessing individuals' inhibitory (and, more generally, executive) control in both clinical and non-clinical settings has been challenged based on the poor reliability of (individual-level) Stroop task performance measures, particularly the Stroop effect, which is calculated as a difference in performance between two conditions. In addition to these measurement concerns, several other critical issues have not been sufficiently examined, including why self-evaluation measures poorly correlate with the Stroop-task performance, the direction of the (possible) causal relationships between the Stroop-task performance and other behavioral measures, and possible differences between oral and manual versions of the task. To gather clues to these issues, we systematically screened studies (n = 1121) in all the domains in which the Stroop task has been used and reviewed those (n = 108) investigating which individual differences in healthy adults are predicted by performance in this task. Surprisingly, the pattern of results we found was considerably fragmented, with only a few studies employing sufficiently large sample sizes to test their hypotheses (n = 30). Nevertheless, we drew on the most straightforward findings to provide more specific advice for authors interested in using this task to investigate and assess executive functioning and higher-level cognitive processing, language, visual processing, personality and attitudinal traits, or substance use.

The role of interoception, the sensing of internal bodily signals, in shaping our understanding of concepts remains an intriguing and understudied area of research. Here, we investigate the interoceptive foundation of conceptual representation, particularly for abstract concepts compared to concrete ones. Using a novel mouse-tracking paradigm, participants categorized various types of abstract and concrete concepts (i.e., abstract emotional, abstract philosophical, concrete natural and concrete artifact) as interoceptive (i.e., experienced through internal bodily sensations) or exteroceptive (i.e., experienced through the five perceptual senses). Results on the reaction times show that abstract-emotional concepts were more readily classified as interoceptive than abstract-philosophical concepts, emphasizing the importance of the interoceptive dimension for this category. Movement trajectories showed the implicit activation of interoceptive features also during the categorization of concrete natural concepts. To account for individual differences in interoceptive accuracy (i.e., the ability to accurately perceive visceral signals), participants performed a cardiac interoceptive task (i.e., the heartbeat counting task). Higher interoceptive accuracy was associated with faster categorization speeds, particularly for concrete-natural concepts. Taken together, our findings emphasize the multifaceted nature of conceptual knowledge where the interoceptive dimension plays a key role.

Listening to a computer-presented stomach rumble can induce an illusion, whereby the sound seems to arise from one's own body - illusory mislocalisation. This represents one of the few examples of an interoceptive illusion and has been used to examine the nature of interoceptive hunger. The illusion's mechanism(s) is unknown as are the conditions necessary to maximise it. Here, we examine if illusory mislocalisation can be augmented by manipulating the ambiguity of the sound source. Participants were randomised to one of two conditions, either receiving sounds via headphones or from a hidden speaker. Test sounds - stomach rumbles, electrical noise, and silence - were presented in conjunction with food pictures, with participants judging desire to eat the depicted foods and the sound's source. Participants in both conditions experienced episodes of illusory mislocalisation (Cohen's d's > 1.3). However, significantly more people experienced it in the hidden speaker condition (Cohen's d = 0.4). Desire to eat ratings were higher in those reporting illusory mislocalisation, but this did not differ by sound presentation condition. The implications for putative models of illusory mislocalisation - notably associative and multisensory accounts - are discussed, with an adapted multisensory account best supported.

Affective touch offers numerous benefits for touchers and touchees, including emotional regulation. However, individuals are engaging in affective touch increasingly less, in part due to the digitalization of experiences, which motivates the question of whether the emotional benefits of affective touch can be conveyed in alternative ways, such as through different sensory modalities. With this in mind, we investigated the emotional responses to the auditory signals produced by organic affective touch gestures. In particular, participants in our five online experiments evaluated different sounds resulting from touch gestures performed by real romantically involved dyads. Experiment 1 provided an overview of the organic affective touch space. Experiment 2 revealed that, lacking explicit cues about the nature of the sounds, organic affective touch sounds elicited emotional responses with reduced positivity, similar to those evoked by object-based interaction sounds. Moreover, we found that individuals were unable to confidently identify whether the sounds involved affective touch gestures. Experiment 3 revealed that framing organic affective touch sounds explicitly as real affective touch, rather than as object-based tactile interactions, elicited more positive emotional responses. Experiment 4 revealed that greater congruence between individuals' expectations of the sounds of affective touch and the actual auditory cues positively influenced the valence elicited by the sounds. Experiment 5 replicated the effects of framing on the valence of elicited responses with a more salient experimental manipulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of affective touch and underscore the importance of meaning in the construction of its emotional space.

Online cognitive research presents numerous advantages in terms of accessibility and flexibility, often facilitating recruitment and testing. Despite the growing use of online cognitive testing, concerns remain regarding how the unsupervised and uncontrolled environment of this context may be impacting task performance. While various mitigating strategies have been proposed to improve data quality in online testing, their effects have not been consistently evaluated for online cognitive experiments and tend to be assessed in isolation and in single-session studies. To address these limitations, the present study investigated the effects of experimenter presence and instruction feedback on task performance, instruction comprehension, and user experience in an online multi-session study. A total of 109 participants completed one of four conditions where experimenter presence and instruction feedback were manipulated. Each participant was tested over two sessions occurring seven days apart. Participants completed a spatial working memory task in one session and a convergent thinking task in the other, counterbalanced across sessions. Results demonstrated similar instruction comprehension and user experiences across conditions, but significant effects of both experimenter presence and instruction feedback on task performance which varied according to the testing session order, the type of task, and the level of difficulty of the task. The current study adds to the growing literature on the relevance of testing parameters in online cognitive testing by demonstrating how characteristics of the experimental design (type of task, number of sessions) moderate the effects that online parameters have on cognitive performance.

Hybrid distractor-interference tasks frequently produce a paradoxical data pattern. Within-trial congruency effects associated with two distractors interact, consistent with domain-general control, while across-trial congruency sequence effects (CSEs) associated with the same distractors sum additively, consistent with domain-specific control. Recent findings from the hybrid prime-Simon task suggest that controlling for a confound called the reactivation aversion effect (RAE) resolves this "generality-specificity paradox" by eliminating the within-trial interaction between congruency effects. As there are competing accounts of this interaction, however, it remains unclear whether controlling for the RAE always eliminates it. To contrast this possibility with the competing accounts, we varied across three experiments (N = 168) (a) whether one of the two congruency effects was relatively large or relatively small and (b) whether two distractors engendered the same or different types of conflict. We observed a within-trial interaction while controlling for the RAE when one of the two congruency effects was relatively large regardless of whether the two distractors engendered the same or different types of conflict. This outcome suggests that controlling for the RAE may not always resolve the generality-specificity paradox. It also supports the view that observing a within-trial interaction is more likely when there is sufficient "operating space" for congruency effects to interact.

Afternoon naps can alleviate drowsiness, enhance alertness, and restore attentional resources. Prospective memory (PM) involves memory to perform future actions. Although numerous studies have found that nighttime sleep benefits PM, the question of whether afternoon naps improve PM remains unclear. This study uses the multinomial process tree (MPT) model to investigate the effect of afternoon naps on PM and its components. This study included 55 participants, who were randomly assigned to two groups: the experimental group (n = 28) and the control group (n = 27). The experimental group was required to take a 30-minute nap, while the control group performed filler tasks for 30 min. The pre-test was conducted 10 min after waking up from the nap, while the post-test was 3 h after waking up. The results revealed that afternoon nap only facilitated PM performance on the post-test. Participants in the experimental group had slower responses to ongoing tasks and PM tasks, reflecting the enhancement of control processing and supporting the preparatory attention processing and memory processing theory. Finally, the results of MPT model revealed that afternoon nap promoted the prospective component of PM but had no effect on its retrospective component. These suggest that afternoon naps mainly boost cue monitoring in PM rather than intention retrieval.

To establish whether humans possess a rapid implicit mentalizing system enabling efficient social interaction, researchers have extensively investigated spontaneous visual perspective taking using paradigms such as the dot perspective task. Yet the validity of this task has been challenged by the submentalizing account, which attributes the observed self-consistency effects (altercentric interferences) to domain-general attentional orienting. We devised a novel mirror-reflection paradigm that equates visual information between participant and avatar while preserving the avatar's directional cue to isolate the contributions of directional attention versus visual content alignment. In two within-subjects experiments (n = 50 and 53), participants judged the number of targets visible either to themselves or to an avatar whose body orientation was consistent or inconsistent with target location. Crucially, mirrors ensured that the avatar always shared the participant's visual access; in control (blackboard) scenes, visual access could differ. Robust consistency effects emerged and, critically, the magnitude of the altercentric interferences was not modulated by the scene type. A blocked-perspective replication (Experiment 2) ruled out perspective-switching costs as an alternative explanation. These findings demonstrate that directional attentional orienting, rather than spontaneous perspective-taking, underlies performance in the dot-perspective task, providing compelling evidence for the submentalizing account and cautioning against the use of the task as a pure index of implicit theory of mind.

Cognitive-motor interference refers to the interaction between cognitive and motor processes occurring at the same time. Recently, balance control parameters while standing on a force plate were analysed using an event-related approach while participants performed a Simon task. Resolving response conflict in incongruent trials reduced balance adjustments prior to manual response execution, suggesting a bottleneck for concurrent cognitive and balance control. In the present study, we combined this approach with a cognitive dual task which comprised a visual-vocal short-term memory task with a delayed vocal response and an auditory-manual reaction time (RT) task. This hybrid psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm created a functional processing bottleneck during memory consolidation in the visual-vocal short-term memory task. To examine how this cognitive bottleneck influences balance control, 48 participants per experiment stood quietly on a force plate, and balance control was quantified as moment variability (mN·m) in 100 ms sliding windows. We varied the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA: 100 vs. 1,000 ms) between the targets (Experiment 1) and task load (report vs. ignore the visual object; Experiment 2). As expected, auditory-manual RTs increased at short SOA, showing dual-task interference that persisted in ignore trials, consistent with task-set inertia. Force-plate data were analysed using cluster permutation analysis to identify time-specific effects. Participants were less likely to adjust balance during cognitive task processing and more likely after task completion, independent of the presence of a cognitive bottleneck. These findings suggest that balance control flexibly delays or advances balance adjustments based on cognitive demands, thereby reducing cognitive-motor interference. PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: This study shows that when people are performing demanding cognitive tasks, such as remembering information while responding to auditory signals, balance adjustments can be temporarily reduced or altered, particularly when the cognitive tasks are difficult. These findings highlight the interaction of cognitive tasks and balance and specifically provide insights into how cognitive processes influence stability during standing. Our understanding of the mechanisms linking cognition and balance may guide future studies on how such interactions change with age or cognitive impairment.