Psychological Research-Psychologische Forschung最新文献

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.

How do the sounds encountered in lab-based experiments compare with those heard in everyday listening? A detailed survey of non-speech auditory perception stimuli from 1000+ experiments in prominent journals showed approximately 90% are simplistic tones with minimal temporal variation (Schutz & Gillard Scientific Reports, 10(1) 9520, 2020). To contextualize that finding, here we apply a similar framework for classifying a corpus of everyday sounds drawn from two sources: (a) recordings intentionally selected to represent common sound events organized by Norman-Haignere et al. Neuron, 88(6) 1281-1296, (2015), and (b) recordings from two million + YouTube videos by Gemmeke et al. (2017). We found that 87% of non-speech sounds in this sample exhibit complex, time-varying characteristics-which are found in less than 11% of non-speech auditory perception stimuli. As these results provide clear documentation of a profound disconnect between what the auditory system encounters in everyday listening and how it is studied in laboratories, we conclude by reviewing an emerging body of research exploring ways in which sounds lacking temporal complexity fail to fully reveal the auditory system's limits and capabilities. This demonstrates the risks inherent in attempting to draw generalized conclusions about the auditory system from a body of research focused overwhelmingly on a single type of stimulus.

Hearing loss is the most common sensory deficit. Deaf adults outperform hearing adults in terms of the visual processing of extrafoveal moving stimuli and fearful facial expressions, probably due to compensatory mechanisms. However, it remains unresolved whether these enhanced visual abilities also apply to happy facial expressions, which are the most universally recognized and prioritized prosocial signals among all the facial expressions. To address this question, we aimed to investigate hearing-impaired adults' processing of happy faces at unconscious (Experiment 1) and conscious (Experiment 2) levels. In Experiment 1, we paired backward-masked faces with supraliminal faces in both visual fields and asked participants to perform a go/no-go task only for the supraliminal faces. Results revealed that the discrimination of visible emotional faces (either happy or neutral) was modulated by the facial expressions of the backward-masked faces in the opposite visual field. The emotionally congruent condition showed higher accuracy than the incongruent condition. However, this effect was observed only for participants whose visual awareness of backward-masked faces was above the chance level in the final awareness check task. Results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that the conscious processing of happy faces remained intact in hearing-impaired adults, as reflected in the happy-face recognition advantage in reaction time. Overall, these findings imply that extrafoveal happy face processing relies on visual awareness in hearing-impaired adults. The present study provides insights into the visual perception ability of facial expressions in the hearing-impaired population.

We examined whether those who chronically use cannabis (chronic users), compared to those who do not use cannabis (non-users), tend to precrastinate (start or complete a subgoal as soon as possible) and engage in reactive (vs. proactive) decision-making incurring greater potential costs in task performance and perhaps costs in cognitive and physical effort. Participants walked down a hallway and retrieved two full cups of water (one near and one far from their starting position) in the order of their choice and carried both back to their start location with the goal of not spilling. First-cup choice (near or far) and attributions of first-cup choice were recorded. Counter to expectations, chronic users tended to choose the far cup first (i.e., avoided precrastination), the more efficient choice, and this tendency was not different from non-users. Participants' attributions confirmed that those who chose the far cup first likely engaged in proactive decision-making while those who chose the near cup first likely engaged in reactive decision-making. Additionally, chronic users and non-users utilized proactive control in the AX-Continuous Performance Task even though chronic users had lower short-term and working memory span scores. These results contradict research suggesting chronic users (vs. non-users) are more impulsive, lack inhibitory control, tend to invest physical effort regardless of reward, and tend not to invest cognitive effort for reward. We suggest that chronic cannabis use may not impair decision making as profoundly as previously thought if individuals are motivated by potential consequences of their decisions in tasks with low memory demand.