Psychological Research-Psychologische Forschung最新文献

The familiar-size Stroop effect shows how prior knowledge of an object's real-world size influences visual size judgments, slowing reactions when familiar and visual sizes conflict. This study examined how space-magnitude associations, specifically mental number line (MNL) compatibility, interact with Stroop congruency. Participants compared the visual sizes of two objects, ignoring real-world sizes, and identified either the smaller or the larger object across four conditions: Stroop-congruent/MNL-compatible, Stroop-congruent/MNL-incompatible, Stroop-incongruent/MNL-compatible, and Stroop-incongruent/MNL-incompatible. Tasks followed small-then-large or large-then-small identification sequences. Results showed MNL compatibility modulates Stroop interference: MNL-compatible (small-left, large-right) presentations reduced interference, while MNL-incompatible (large-left, small-right) presentations increased it, depending on task type and order. RT distribution analyses revealed MNL effects emerged in slower bins for Stroop-congruent trials and faster bins for Stroop-incongruent trials within small-then-large sequences. These findings suggest that space-magnitude associations shape the familiar-size Stroop effect, revealing a complex relationship between spatial and conceptual representations in size judgment.

The current study is a novel investigation of remembered affordances using the analytic framework of memory psychophysics, which generally demonstrates memory degradation for stimulus magnitudes even after short delay intervals. Participants made perceived and remembered reports of the affordance reach-with-ability and length (a proportional physical dimension of reach-with-ability) of a series of rods. The results were similar to past research on affordance perception, demonstrating a lower scaling exponent (i.e., discriminability) for remembered reach-with-ability than remembered length. Furthermore, we found no evidence of memory decay in either length or reach-with-ability after a 1 min delay interval with a distractor task. The findings demonstrate that memory psychophysics offers a useful framework to study perception, memory, and cognition.

Studies have shown that variations in stimulus-hand proximity alter conflict processing. Stimulus-response (S-R) conflict in visuo- and auditory Simon tasks increases when response hands are placed close (proximal) to the stimulus compared to when they are placed far (distal) from the stimulus. Conversely, a stimulus-stimulus (S-S) conflict in a classical visual Stroop paradigm was reduced in a proximal compared to a distal stimulus-hand condition. This suggests that stimulus-hand proximity may affect S-S and S-R conflict processing differently. However, it remains unclear whether a proximal stimulus-hand condition would also reduce the Stroop conflict in the auditory domain, where the task-irrelevant information requires pure semantic processing independent of the visual-spatial component of reading. The present study investigated the influence of stimulus-hand proximity on S-S and spatial S-R conflict processing in an auditory gender-categorization Stroop task (Experiments 1 and 2) and a Simon task (Experiment 3) by using the same stimulus materials in all experiments. The results consistently demonstrated that the auditory Stroop effect was unaffected by stimulus-hand proximity. This raises the question of the extent to which stimulus-hand proximity in previous demonstrations of reduced visual Stroop effects impacted semantic or rather visual-spatial processing. Finally, introducing a task-irrelevant spatial stimulus attribute and transforming the auditory Stroop task into an auditory Simon task increased interference in the proximal compared to the distal stimulus-hand condition. These findings suggest that response hands near visual and auditory stimuli seem to facilitate spatial feature processing.

Performing mental arithmetic on brief temporal durations has been recently shown to induce operation-specific distortions. In a time reproduction task, addition resulted in longer responses while subtraction induced shorter responses, despite their identical arithmetic outcome (Bonato et al., Cognition, 206, 2021). This effect has been named temporal momentum, in analogy with the representational momentum found when representing the position of moving objects, and it mirrors the operational momentum characterizing mental arithmetic with numerical quantities. In Experiment 1, we assessed the reliability of the temporal momentum effect in the first direct replication of Bonato et al.'s temporal arithmetic task by using an online procedure for data collection. In Experiment 2, we also tested whether under-estimation in subtraction could be attributed to the longer operand being always presented first in the original study. The results showed a reliable temporal momentum effect that was virtually indistinguishable from previous, laboratory-based experiments. Moreover, in Experiment 2, under-estimation in subtraction was still present when participants had to compute the difference between two operands regardless of their order, thereby excluding that the temporal momentum in subtraction is due to the specific ordering of the stimuli. This pre-registered study further demonstrates that the temporal momentum effect is a robust and reliable marker indexing the mental manipulation of time durations, consistent with the hypothesis that time processing includes some features resembling those involved in spatial processing.

Over the past two decades, many investigators explored the extent to which spatial attention is required for scene categorization and no consistent conclusion was reached. More importantly, no prior studies have systematically examined this issue from the perspective of temporal attention. Using attentional blink (AB) paradigm, the present study investigated the necessity of temporal attention for scene categorization through three experiments where participants categorized one (or two) target scene(s) embedded in distractor streams. In Experiment 1 where both T1 and T2 were task-relevant scenes requiring categorization, we observed a categorical identity advantage effect: T2|T1 accuracy was significantly higher when both scenes shared the same category than they belonged to different categories. Experiment 2 dissociated task relevance between two targets. When only T2 required categorization with high task-relevance of T1 distractors (in Experiment 2a), T1-induced interference magnitude was comparable to that of dual-task condition in Experiment 1. Conversely, when only T1 required categorization with low task-relevance of T2 distractors (in Experiment 2b), which produced weaker interference than both Experiment 1 and 2a. These findings demonstrate that temporal attention allocation in scene categorization depends on task relevance, suggesting dynamic attentional gating mechanisms during rapid scene categorization.

In spatial Stroop tasks with gaze stimuli, the reversed congruency effect (RCE) refers to slower responses in congruent (i.e., a gaze pointing right presented on the right side of the screen) than incongruent (i.e., a gaze pointing right presented on the left side of the screen) trials. The nature of the RCE may stem from social attention mechanisms. In line with this social account, an increasing number of studies have shown that the RCE is modulated by characteristics of facial stimuli, such as social relevance or emotions. The present study investigated, through two cross-cultural online experiments, whether the RCE can be shaped by ethnicity. A total of 163 East Asian (Japanese) and European (Italian) participants completed a spatial Stroop task featuring East Asian and European faces. The two types of faces were presented either intermixed within the same block (Experiment 1) or in separate blocks (Experiment 2). The results revealed, in both experiments, a robust RCE, irrespective of participant or facial ethnicity. Overall, these findings offer new insights into the RCE and the boundary conditions for its potential modulation by social factors.

Four experiments investigated the idea that temporal reference memory in a temporal generalization task may show dynamic changes from trial to trial even when the standard duration is constant from the procedural point of view. Temporal generalization gradients arising from a constant set of stimuli were shifted by "biased" sequences of comparisons, which apparently moved the contents of temporal reference memory in the direction of the bias. The basic principle was that if a person identified some comparison duration of x ms as being the standard for the task, the value of x affected the effective standard used. This biasing effect was removed by providing participants with accurate feedback, but could be restored by false feedback in the same direction as the bias. A model incorporating the basic idea of dynamic reference memory produced small biasing effects in the appropriate direction, but was not in exact quantitative agreement with the data, suggesting the role of additional processes yet to be discovered.

Working memory (WM) performance declines across the lifespan, partly due to greater vulnerability to distractors in the environment. Successful working memory relies on resistance to distractors, which may enter memory due to ineffective filtering during simultaneous presentation with targets (i.e., during encoding), or due to insufficient ability to ignore them during maintenance. Prior research offers mixed conclusions regarding whether impaired distractor suppression contributes to older adults' (OA) WM deficits. Across three behavioral experiments, we found consistent evidence that OA were more vulnerable to distractors presented during encoding than during maintenance. Unexpectedly, the familiarity of the distractor items had limited impact on performance, whereas low-salience distractors presented during encoding produced robust decrements in accuracy and increases in reaction time. These results demonstrate that distraction during encoding is a driver of WM disruption in older adults, even when the distractors are subtle.

This study investigated how induced mood states and emotional facial expressions modulate susceptibility to the Ebbinghaus illusion. Participants received either a positive or negative mood induction before performing the illusion task, in which both the target and inducer circles were replaced by faces displaying angry, happy, or neutral expressions. Results showed that participants in the negative mood group demonstrated a stronger illusion effect when the Ebbinghaus illusion configuration included angry faces, whereas no significant differences across face valence were observed in the positive mood group. These findings suggest that negative mood selectively enhances perceptual integration in the presence of threat-related stimuli, amplifying contextual influences on size perception. In contrast, positive mood may promote cognitive flexibility, facilitating more stable perceptual judgments regardless of emotional context. This research highlights the interplay between internal mood states and external emotional cues in shaping visual perception, and extends our understanding of how emotions influence visual illusions.