Psychological Research-Psychologische Forschung最新文献

We investigated how separately and sequentially acquired visual and motor experiences shape action prediction mechanisms. There is evidence that physical practice leads to an implicit, motor-based prediction process, compared to visual practice, which is more strategic. However, the relative dominance or flexibility of these mechanisms is not well understood. Here we used a motor secondary task paradigm to evaluate effector-specific interference in action predictions, which has previously given evidence for a motor simulation-based prediction process after physical practice. Participants across two groups (N = 40) received both isolated and sequentially combined motor and visual practice across two days; either throwing darts to three different sections of a dartboard "motor" or watching and predicting outcomes of occluded throws "visual". The Motor-to-Visual group threw on Day 1 and watched on Day 2 and the Visual-to-Motor group did the reverse. Prediction tasks were performed pre and post practice each day, with some trials involving motor secondary tasks, performed with the observed (right) or non-observed hand. Consistent with previous work, the Motor-to-Visual group after physical practice improved prediction accuracy on Day 1, except when performing the secondary task with their right hand. After visual practice on Day 2, prediction accuracy was maintained, but without secondary task interference. The Visual-to-Motor group also improved predictions, but with no secondary task interference on either day, resulting in greater accuracy overall. These data support the suggestion that separately acquired motor and visual experiences either allow flexibility in prediction strategies or lead to a dominance of the visually-acquired strategy.

Previous studies have established that coarse discrimination (e.g., left/right, forward/backward) of point-light walker (PLW) direction is modulated by multiple factors including global/local motion information, biological/social factors, and egocentric reference frames. However, the specific contributions of local motion information and egocentric referencing to fine-grained PLW direction estimation remain unclear. Drawing upon principles of biomechanical asymmetry and right-lateralized motor dominance, we hypothesized a systematic overall rightward bias in PLW direction estimation. Through three carefully controlled experiments, we demonstrated that: (1) right-handed participants showed consistently overall rightward estimation bias; (2) this bias was selectively enhanced by right-sided body stimuli while remaining unaffected by left-sided stimuli; and (3) spatial decoupling of stimulus center from egocentric coordinates revealed persistent egocentric coding in the direction estimation. Moreover, prolonged stimulus exposure led to expanded gaze distribution alongside heightened local information processing, underscoring the pivotal role of local information. These findings suggest that biomechanical asymmetries may shape PLW direction perception and reveal the interplay between local information analysis and egocentric referencing in fine-grained biological motion estimation.

Research on level 1 visual perspective taking (L1-VPT) has been debating whether L1-VPT is an implicit socially rooted or rather a non-social process. Using online versions of the Dot Perspective Task by Samson et al. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36(5), 1255-1266, 2010) we approached this question by comparing L1-VPT for robot vs. human avatars. In line with the assumption that visual perspective taking is due to mentalizing, we predicted that perspective taking, leading to altercentric intrusions, should occur more strongly for the human avatars than for the robot avatars. In two experiments, a within-participant design was applied: 2 (avatar: human vs. robot) × 2 (avatar perspective: consistent vs. inconsistent) × 2 (task: avatar perspective vs. self-perspective). The human avatar was a male in Experiment 1 (n = 120) and a female in Experiment 2 (n = 113). The analyses of reaction times and error rates showed significant, medium to large egocentric intrusions and significant, small to medium altercentric intrusions for both avatar types, suggesting interference from the irrelevant perspective. Against the prediction, the altercentric intrusions for human avatars were not significantly larger than for robot avatars. Taking into account methodological concerns and suggesting future experimental variations, we argue that the submentalizing approach assuming that visual perspective taking is based on domain general processes provides a good explanation for our results.

The Other-Race Effect (ORE), characterized by superior recognition of same-race (SR) faces, remains poorly understood in children despite robust adult evidence. Developmental studies yield conflicting results, reflecting immature social categorization systems and limited cross-race experience. Drawing on the Categorization-Individuation Model, this study integrates behavioral and eye-tracking measures to investigate how social categorization (via country labels) and motivational incentives shape racial face recognition in Chinese children. Using both real and cartoon faces, we demonstrate three key findings: (1) Own-country labels enhance recognition accuracy and attentional engagement (longer fixations, larger pupil diameters) for labeled faces, overriding racial features; (2) Strong motivation eliminates the ORE by increasing configural processing for other-race (OR) faces; (3) Cartoon faces show comparable label and motivation effects, though with reduced magnitude. These results advance the CIM by demonstrating that top-down social cognition-not just bottom-up expertise-scaffolds early face processing. This research provides novel insights into children's racial face processing and has implications for bias mitigation interventions.

Pre-crastination is the tendency to hasten task completion, even at the expense of extra effort. Discovered in 2014, it is a widespread phenomenon hypothesized to reduce cognitive effort. We sought to determine whether pre-crastination holds for multi-step path planning. In Experiments 1 and 2, our university-student participants saw all but one of the numbers from 1 to 6 on a computer screen and, when ready, hit the spacebar (Experiment 1) or touched the trackpad (Experiment 2) to reveal the missing number. In both experiments, they then clicked on the targets sequentially as quickly as possible. The time for the first target was longer than for any other target even when noninitial targets were withheld from the preview. A third experiment confirmed that the lengthening of the first response was due to resolution of response uncertainty. The results as a whole confirmed that participants hastened task completion by expending extra effort up front (spending extra time to set up all the responses they would perform). The study extends the reach of pre-crastination and points to the general tendency, now manifest in a growing number of contexts, that, when possible, people complete decision-making about forthcoming response sequences as soon as they can. We refer to this tendency as cognitive frontloading and offer it as a new companion to cognitive offloading, which has been much studied. Both methods reduce memory demands, but in different ways.

While reward cues have long been considered to enhance creative performance, little is known about can rewards affect creative problem solving by manipulate the flexibility and persistence state. Real and hypothetical rewards and two creative problem-solving tasks were used to answer this question. We tested the hypothesis that real rewards would positively affect creativity tasks that benefit from a persistence state (e.g., compound remote associate, CRA), while hypothetical rewards would positively impact tasks that benefit from a flexibility state (e.g., chunk decomposition, CD). Additionally, we hypothesized that low rewards would yield better solution performance than high rewards. The results revealed that hypothetical-high rewards resulted in lower solution performance compared to other reward conditions. Furthermore, hypothetical rewards enhanced performance in novel CD tasks requiring reconfiguration. Participants motivated by real rewards exhibited higher persistence compared to those motivated by hypothetical rewards. Hypothetical rewards during the preparation interval induced a metacontrol bias favoring flexibility. These findings could lead to new views about how the reward impact a creative mindset.

Observing others' emotional expressions facilitates individuals' expectations about the evaluations shared within a social group. This is useful for interpreting ambiguous cultural content, such as unfamiliar actions performed by others. This study investigated whether observed emotional reactions to instrumental actions are used to predict novel individuals' evaluations of those same actions (i.e., generalization), and whether they are more likely to be generalized for unfamiliar compared to familiar actions. Participants were presented with emotional expressions of observers reacting to individuals performing instrumental actions, before selecting the reaction they expected from a novel observer watching the same action performed by a new individual - generalization meaning that the novel observer was expected to elicit the same emotional expression as the initial observer. Experiment 1 found that negative reactions are generalized to predict negative evaluations of unfamiliar but not familiar actions, whereas Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated differences in generalization and influence on expectations of positive and negative displays depending on whether familiar and unfamiliar actions were present. This study sheds light on the affective components of cultural learning, showing that the observation of others' emotional displays enables us to interpret unfamiliar social situations in the absence of direct communication.

This study aims to investigate if predictions can influence subsequent language production in monolingual and bilingual situations. The possibility to correctly predict an upcoming response was operationalized by means of semantic classifier congruency. Participants were instructed to name a picture (e.g., firemen) after seeing or hearing a semantically congruent vs. incongruent classifier (e.g., a crew of). In Experiment 1 with English monolinguals, better performance was observed in semantically congruent trials (a crew of firemen) than in semantically incongruent trials (a packet of ants). In Experiments 2 and 3 with Chinese-English bilinguals, this semantic classifier congruency effect was replicated, but the effect differed in size as a function of the language (larger for L1 Chinese than for L2 English). Additionally, bilingual language control was influenced as the language-switch cost was smaller in congruent than in incongruent trials. Together, these findings suggest that prediction influences both L1 and L2 language production and that this facilitation of language production through prediction had a further impact on language control during language switching.

Wayfinding skills are known to decay in older age. The present study investigated the differential effects of older age on five cognitive strategies that travelers can use for decision-making at intersections. To avoid interindividual and methodological biases, we used a within-person approach, and designed similar environments for all strategies. Thirty young and thirty older adults were asked to navigate five mazes that required decision-making by either the serial order strategy, the associative cue strategy, the beacon strategy, the relative location strategy, or the cognitive map strategy. The order of the five mazes was counterbalanced using a Latin square design; to reduce fatigue, the mazes were administered over two separate sessions. In agreement with extant research, we found that older participants' wayfinding accuracy was poorer than that of young ones. Contrary to literature, however, this age-related decrement was not more pronounced for the cognitive map strategy than for the serial order and the associative cue strategy. We also found that the correlation between wayfinding performance with different strategies decreased to virtually zero in older age. Further regarding the cognitive map strategy, we found that older adults showed reduced ability to acquire incidental knowledge during wayfinding, but with no evidence that they compensated for these deficits by relying on auxiliary environmental cues. We interpret this pattern of findings as evidence that age-related wayfinding deficits are sensitive to task difficulty and are associated with a disintegration of the cognitive mechanisms involved in wayfinding, particularly in tasks with high visuospatial demands and multitasking requirements.

Road sign comprehension is integral to safe driving, with age and driving experience influencing individuals' ability to interpret signs effectively. This study conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to synthesise research data from 2004 to 2024 to understand how age and driving experience affect the ability to comprehend road signs. The review identified factors influencing comprehension, including personal characteristics and cognitive design features. Meta-analyses revealed significant differences in accident rates between young and older drivers and novice and experienced drivers. Specifically, the analysis of 3,330 participants (1,746 young drivers and 1,584 older drivers) showed that young drivers were involved in 15.88% points more accidents than older drivers, with high heterogeneity across studies (I² = 99%, P < 0.00001). Similarly, among 1,958 participants (721 novice drivers and 1,237 experienced drivers), novice drivers were involved in 8.68% points more accidents than experienced drivers, also with substantial variability (I² = 98%, P < 0.00001). The review proposed future research directions to improve road sign design, enhance drivers' understanding, and promote road safety, emphasising the importance of advanced cognitive design features and contextual signage solutions. Insights for policymakers, transportation authorities, and researchers were highlighted, stressing the need to assess traffic sign comprehension and to regularly incorporate user-centred design approaches. Sensitivity analyses and publication bias assessment further strengthened the review's findings, laying the groundwork for evidence-based interventions to enhance road safety worldwide.