Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition最新文献

Numbers are highly relevant in our everyday lives. Besides intentionally processing number magnitude when necessary, we often automatically process it even when not required. The SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes; Dehaene et al., 1993) effect, describing faster left-/right-sided responses to smaller/larger numbers, respectively, provides evidence for this automaticity. It arises in semantic number-processing tasks both, when number magnitude is task-relevant (e.g., magnitude classification) and task-irrelevant (e.g., parity judgment). However, findings on the SNARC effect in tasks requiring the processing of nonsemantic number features are mixed: While it has been observed in orientation judgment tasks, it was mostly absent in color judgment tasks. Importantly, previous studies were underpowered or did not control for confounding variables. In two highly powered online experiments, we found a small but significant SNARC effect in both nominal color judgment (cyan vs. yellow; slope = -1.71 ms) and color intensity judgment (light cyan vs. dark cyan; slope = -1.13 ms) of Arabic digits from 1 to 9 excluding 5, which did not significantly differ in size. Further, we found little evidence for the Linguistic Markedness of Response Codes (i.e., faster left-/right-sided responses to odd/even numbers, respectively; Nuerk et al., 2004) effect. Moreover, the odd effect (i.e., faster responses to even than to odd numbers; Hines, 1990) was detected. Taken together, both magnitude and parity are processed automatically even if participants respond to physical nonsemantic and nonspatial number features, but the spatial mapping seems more automatic for magnitude than for parity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Planning the future relies on the ability to remember how long events last, yet how durations are stored in memory is unknown. Here, we developed a novel n-item delayed duration reproduction task to assess whether elapsed time is stored as a continuous feature or as a discrete item in memory. In three experiments (N = 58), participants were presented with nonisochronous sequences composed of empty time intervals delimited by brief tones. Time intervals varied in number and in duration. Participants had to reproduce as precisely as possible the duration of all time intervals in the sequence following a delay period. We manipulated the number of time intervals (n-item) and the sequence duration to separate their effects on recall precision. In all three experiments, the precision of recall decreased with the number of items in the sequence, showing that durations can be stored as discrete items in working memory. Our analyses emphasize the distinction between reproduction biases that are captured by relative reproduction and decreased precision which indexes working memory load. Future research is needed to spell out the conditions under which durations are fully abstracted in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In a recognition memory task, correct "old" responses to previously studied target items (hits) trigger larger pupil dilation (PD) than correct "new" responses to previously not presented foil items (correct rejections). This pupil old/new effect reflects the specific processes involved in recognition decisions, with dilation being larger when decisions are based on recollection of contextual details rather than mere familiarity. However, previous research has been limited in determining the exact link between PD and recognition processes due to the categorical nature of tasks used to assess recollection/familiarity. To investigate this issue, we examined whether the precision of the recollected memory representation is related to PD during successful recognition. During encoding, target words were presented on the outline of an invisible circle, and during a subsequent recognition task, participants made old/new decisions. For "old" responses, participants had to indicate the exact location of the target on the outline of the invisible circle. We found that larger PD during the old/new decision was related to more precise subsequent localization decision. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that PD and memory precision are linearly related, and even hits followed by unprecise source localization trigger larger PD than correct rejections. Thus, increased PD is present for all recognition decisions, but its magnitude increases with increasing precision of source recollection. This pattern of results suggests that the pupil old/new effect might originate from two distinct components: The first is related to the mere recognition of a word, whereas the second reflects the quality of recollected source information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic transparency refers to the degree to which the meaning of the whole word can be inferred from its constituents. For Chinese, semantic radicals generally carry information about the meanings of Chinese characters and, thus, can be used to reflect semantic transparency of Chinese characters. For those Chinese characters having the same semantic radicals (i.e., neighboring characters), their meanings are assumed to be semantically related to each other. However, to what extent those neighboring characters are close in their meanings remains unclear. A conventional crowdsource approach could provide a coarse measure of semantic relationships between semantic neighbors. However, those approaches are generally limited to a small sample size of characters. Here, we proposed a corpus-based measure of semantic transparency, termed semantic radical consistency (SRC). Specifically, we utilized the Word2Vec models to construct a Chinese semantic space and quantified the SRC for 3,423 characters. To evaluate the SRC, we first conducted linear mixed-effect modeling analyses to verify the explanatory power of SRC on a large-scale Chinese character naming reaction times. Second, we investigated the SRC effect by conducting a word naming task based on traditional factorial designs. Both the linear mixed-effect modeling and factorial naming results demonstrated that SRC was a unique and reliable variable to account for the variance in traditional Chinese character naming reaction times. The results indicated this innovative, corpus-derived SRC was able to effectively reflect the semantic transparency level by measuring semantic distances among characters in the same semantic radical category. Further investigations on the interaction between SRC and phonetic radical consistency demonstrated the cooperative nature between phonological and semantic reading pathways. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Data visualizations are common in publications addressed to scientists and the general public. A common graph distortion effect can be obtained by changing the y-axis range. On bar graphs with lower truncated scales (the y-axis starting point is above the data origin), observers tend to perceive larger differences between the values depicted. Herein, we define anchors, information that can be perceived from a graph, to explain ratings of differences in bar graphs. Study 1 examined whether the upper y-axis truncation effect exists or not. We confirmed its existence even though the effect size is smaller compared to lower y-axis truncation effect. Study 2 examined lower and upper y-axis truncations and expansions. We found that, compared to graphs without distortions, observers perceive larger differences between values when there is truncation and smaller differences when there is expansion at either end of the y-axis. Study 3 examined whether the effects of lower and upper y-axis distortions are also present on reversed bar graphs. We found that the black bars biased observers more when they are truncated, as it reduces their area. Finally, Study 4 examined the impact of y-axis distortions on bar graphs, dot graphs, and line graphs. We found that a plot not showing bars results in less biased judgments in the presence of truncation and similar biases for lower and upper truncation. We discuss the results of other relevant research using these anchors and argue that characterizing graphs using the anchors proposed herein can be generalized to other data visualizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Everyday situations require us to face a trade-off to inform our decisions: exploit known information or explore for new information. Although both have risks, empirical research has not shown whether individuals prefer exploring or exploiting across contexts. In the present study, we examined the explore-exploit trade-off as a theoretical framework across two broad domains: decision making and spatial navigation. In this registered report, we applied computational modeling to human behavior on a novel version of the Iowa gambling task to predict behavior on a spatial navigation task in which the navigator must either exploit a learned, familiar route or explore a new shortcut. If the hypothesis that risk tolerance is a domain-general trait is correct, we predicted that explore-exploit patterns would correlate across these tasks. We also examine the predictive power of computational models for the Iowa gambling task on behavioral uncertainty and the role of confidence in spatial navigation strategy. Our findings suggest that, while there is some overlap in risk tolerance between spatial navigation and gambling, the influence of exploration and exploitation on navigational decision making is weaker than initially predicted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory (WM) is the cognitive system that allows the temporary holding of mental representations for use in thought and action. Long-term memory (LTM) refers to our ability to remember a potentially unlimited amount of information over longer time periods. Understanding how these two memory systems interact has important implications for theories of cognition, learning, and education. Here, we examined (a) whether a shared perceptual bottleneck accounts for the relation between WM and LTM accuracy, and (b) whether serial position effects in WM are mirrored in LTM. In two experiments, participants studied sequences of objects at varying set sizes and completed old/new recognition tests for some items immediately after encoding (WM tests) and for other items after all WM trials were completed (LTM tests). In Experiment 1 (N = 80), LTM performance was better for items presented in lower rather than higher set size sequences, indicating that limitations in WM capacity constrain LTM encoding, irrespective of perceptual bottlenecks. In Experiment 2 (N = 120), we observed WM and LTM recency effects, but primacy effects were only present in LTM and not in WM. Thus, serial position effects in WM did not consistently predict the relative rates at which items from different serial positions were preserved in LTM. These results reinforce accounts that view WM and LTM as having at least partially separate mechanisms, shedding light on the nature of these mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There is empirical evidence that people have some intuitive discomfort when they judge that a believable, but invalid response is logically valid. This has led to the hypothesis that there exists a form of "logical intuition" that is responsive to logical form. However, there is also clear evidence that when reasoning with identical forms of inference, responses are not uniform but are instead modulated by access to semantic information related to potential alternatives. In two preregistered studies, we examine the hypothesis that differential access to such information determines the extent to which intuitions signal discomfort. To examine this, we constructed syllogisms using the same logical form but having either few or many alternatives associated with the premises. In Study 1, we show that when accepting a believable conclusion as being valid, confidence was lower for syllogisms having many alternatives. In Study 2, we show that people "like" conclusions based on logically invalid syllogisms having few alternatives more than those based on syllogisms having many alternatives. These results provide clear evidence for a form of "logical intuition" that relies on access to semantic information rather than pure logical form. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There is now robust evidence of priming effects during sentence processing for adjacent words that form collocations (statistically associated combinations). However, there is very limited evidence regarding how nonadjacent collocations might facilitate processing. Furthermore, no previous research has examined how nonadjacent collocations interplay with other (non)collocational material in the surrounding context. We employed "nested" collocations for the first time, in which more than one contextual element (verb, adjective) is a potential collocate for a noun. For example, in a verb-adjective-noun (V-A-N) phrase, two collocations may be "nested" ("express concerns" + "valid concerns" = "express valid concerns") or only the verb (nonadjacent) or adjective (adjacent) might be collocational. In an eye-tracking experiment with L1 English speakers, we manipulated the collocational status of adjectives adjacent to the noun, (V)-A-N, and verbs nonadjacent to the noun, V-(A)-N. Our results replicated the basic adjacent effect and produced evidence of facilitation for nonadjacent collocations. Additionally, we find preliminary evidence for a syntactic primacy effect, whereby collocational links involving the verb prove more impactful than adjective-noun collocations, despite nonadjacency. Importantly, the results reveal cumulative facilitation in "nested collocations," with a boost resulting from the simultaneous effects observed in adjacent and nonadjacent collocations. Altogether, the results extend our understanding of collocational priming effects beyond single collocations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Repeatedly seen or heard statements are typically judged to be more likely true than statements not encountered before, a phenomenon referred to as truth effect. Similarly, statements judged to be old typically receive higher truth judgments than statements judged to be new. However, it is unclear whether and how this recognition-based truth effect depends on the latent memory states underlying observed recognition judgments. In order to investigate this question, we used a model-based approach to compare truth judgments as a function of recognition judgments ("old" vs. "new") and their underlying memory states (state of memory certainty vs. state of uncertainty). In three experiments, we observed a recognition-based truth effect and found this effect to be larger in the state of memory certainty than in the state of uncertainty. This result also replicated for subjective instead of modeled memory states. Moreover, we found effects of recognition judgments on judged truth to be stronger than effects of factual repetition in all three experiments. Taken together, our research highlights the role of episodic memory processes in the truth effect and provides a methodological tool that takes underlying memory states into account. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).