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

Regressive eye movements are commonly observed in response to syntactic ambiguities, yet their characteristics and role in ambiguity resolution remain unclear. This study examined two key questions about rereading in Chinese garden-path sentences: (1) whether rereading is selective, meaning that readers allocate more or longer fixations to specific regions following garden-path disambiguation and (2) whether rereading facilitates comprehension by aiding the recovery of the globally correct interpretation. We therefore conducted an eye-tracking experiment on sentences featuring a naturally occurring syntactic ambiguity (NP1 + VP + NP2 + de + NP3). The results provide clear evidence of selective rereading, as readers refixated the ambiguous region after encountering processing difficulty. However, these refixations did not aid ambiguity resolution, suggesting that while regressions reflect sensitivity to processing disruptions, they do not always contribute to successful reinterpretation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Pavlovian biases are patterns of behavior that involve approaching stimuli associated with reward and avoiding those associated with punishment (regardless of whether this is actually optimal behavior). They are a ubiquitous feature of everyday decision making and are also believed to play an important role in the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Although Pavlovian biases have classically been described as fixed and automatic, some studies have indicated that their influence on behavior can actually vary over time and with task demands. While these results hint that people may have some control over their Pavlovian biases, direct behavioral evidence for this control is still lacking. In a preregistered, double-blind, sham-controlled study (N = 800), we tested whether a week-long cognitive training intervention could reduce Pavlovian biases on the orthogonalized go/no-go task, a well-established paradigm for isolating Pavlovian-instrumental conflict. Participants were trained on either high-conflict or no-conflict conditions of the task across 5 days. Using reinforcement learning models to dissociate components of decision making, we found that high-conflict training led to a significant reduction in Pavlovian bias-particularly avoidance bias-at follow-up. This result is incompatible with the view that Pavlovian biases are fixed and automatic, and instead implies much greater flexibility in the way that they influence cognition than has previously been understood. The training was kept deliberately simple (i.e., one stimulus per condition, with the correct responses kept constant over sessions) so as to provide a minimal proof of concept of whether Pavlovian biases can be reduced through training, but as a result, we did not observe transfer to other tasks or self-reported mood. Nonetheless, these findings demonstrate that targeted cognitive training can modulate Pavlovian biases, which may be beneficial both in everyday life and especially in the context of affective disorders like anxiety and depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The plasticity of cognitive control is a hallmark of human cognition, and previous research has examined how repeated task experience leads to the improvement of cognitive control in novel task environments. However, the factors enabling such transfer remain hotly debated. This series of three studies directly explored specific strategies that might underlie adults' successful transfer of cognitive control. We focused on proactive control, a strategy hypothesized to rely on overlapping control operations across cognitive control tasks. However, in Experiment 1 (n = 156), our Bayesian analyses demonstrated the absence of transfer of proactive control from a cued task-switching task to an AX-Continuous Performance Test. Experiments 2 (n = 148) and 3 (n = 174) therefore focused on goal-irrelevant contextual information in addition to proactive control strategies. Experiment 2 provided moderate evidence that matching goal-irrelevant information, such as backgrounds and trial timelines, facilitated the transfer of cognitive control. Experiment 3 replicated these findings, indicating that the cross-paradigm transfer occurred when goal-irrelevant contextual backgrounds are matched. These findings underscore the importance of broadening the existing research focus on goal-relevant information to also consider goal-irrelevant task knowledge when examining cross-paradigm transfer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The articulation of speech segments is influenced by their phonetic context. Human speech perception seems to compensate for such coarticulatory effects, interpreting acoustic cues relative to their values expected in the current context. We test whether similar compensation is observed for visually presented, nonphonetic contexts (a pen in the mouth of a talker), as predicted by some accounts of perceptual compensation. In a series of perception experiments, we find that listeners compensate for the presence of a pen in the mouth of the talker, as long as the effects of the pen on the articulators (e.g., lip shape) are visually evident. Beyond demonstrating perceptual compensation for nonphonetic contexts, these findings also inform ongoing theoretical debates in the literature on perceptual recalibration, where similar manipulations have been found to block or reduce perceptual learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We investigated the mechanism of the lingering effect in relation to the garden-path effect based on self-paced reading and comprehension experiments in Japanese, which shows higher reanalysis success rates than English does. The lingering effect is a phenomenon whereby an initial misinterpretation persists in the final comprehension even after disambiguation. Through self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and comprehension tasks (Experiments 2 and 3), this study explored how the length and head position of ambiguous regions influence the garden-path and lingering effects. Our results indicate that the length and head position influenced the garden-path and lingering effects in different ways. In particular, a longer initial misparse strengthened the garden-path effect in a linear manner but weakened the lingering effect in a nonlinear manner. Additionally, surprisal affected the garden-path effect but not the lingering effect. These results support the notion that the garden-path and lingering effects are correlated but operate through different underlying processes. Specifically, the garden-path effect pertains to parsing, whereas the lingering effect relates to short-term memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent research has demonstrated that task switching-which has traditionally been attributed to declarative rule use and executive control-can also be supported by associative learning mechanisms. However, whereas declarative task switching is characterized by large switch costs and small congruency effects, associative mechanisms may produce small (or no) switch costs and large congruency effects. Here, we asked whether humans (who possess both declarative and associative learning mechanisms) and pigeons (which have thus far shown no evidence of possessing declarative learning mechanisms) would display different patterns of performance when switching either between two rule-based (RB) subtasks, which should encourage declarative rule use, or between two information integration (II) subtasks, which should encourage associative learning. The pigeons showed no switch costs in either task condition, consistent with the view that they depend entirely on associative mechanisms to solve both RB and II tasks. Conversely, the humans showed strong switch costs in both task conditions. These data raise two possibilities: (a) that human learners may have used declarative mechanisms to solve both RB and II tasks and (b) that among humans, associative learning mechanisms might not reliably preclude switch costs. The theoretical implications of each possibility are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In speech production, there is a long-standing debate regarding whether word-level prosodic structure has an independent representation separable from segments. Using a novel assay of sensorimotor adaptation, we observe straightforward evidence supporting an independent prosodic structure even after its coordination with the segments. Participants exposed to opposing formant perturbations applied to the two syllables of a single trained word (e.g., "bedhead" → "bidhad") adapted separately to counteract the syllable-specific perturbations (i.e., producing "badhid") and, critically, transferred the learned adaptation to untrained words based purely on shared prosodic structure (words with the same prosody but novel syllables, e.g., producing "breastfed" like "brastfid"). This evidence for an independent word-level prosodic representation, which has been hard to detect in previous studies, highlights the usefulness of sensorimotor adaptation as a tool for language production research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning traps are cycles of suboptimal decision making where a false belief about the structure of the environment leads to avoidance of rewarding options. Two experiments (N = 324) examined the role of selective attention in the emergence and prevention of learning traps. Participants learned to approach or avoid members of two categories that were associated with either gains or losses. A rule involving two visual feature dimensions predicted category membership, while a third dimension was irrelevant. Category feedback was provided only when an item was approached. Selective attention during learning was assessed using an eye tracker. Experiment 1 found that many participants fell into the trap of using a single-dimension rule to guide approach/avoid decisions and consequently missed rewards. Eye tracking confirmed that these participants narrowed their visual attention to a single dimension. In Experiment 2, attention to multiple exemplar features was increased by adding a salient visual highlighting cue. When only predictive features were highlighted, trap prevalence was reduced. A key finding was that shifts in selective attention always occurred at the same time or after formation of beliefs about category structure, indicating the causal primacy of such beliefs in trap formation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The ideomotor principle states that actions are selected by anticipating their effects. An abundance of empirical results supports this contention, but whether the effect of an action is delayed by an interval of a particular duration has mostly been a procedural detail in such studies. We will refer to this generically as an action-effect (A-E) delay. Few studies explicitly addressed the interval and its duration and concluded that its duration is a distinct feature of the effect and seems to be anticipated as well: Response times are longer when the interval is predictably longer relative to when it is shorter; hence, we observe delayed-effect costs. We here question this conclusion because the duration of the A-E interval and the total trial duration were confounded in all previous studies on that topic. Experiment 1 dissociated both features by manipulating either the A-E interval, the intertrial interval, or both in a negatively correlated way, yielding the same total trial duration. Results favor the hypothesis that the total trial duration is key to the delayed-effect costs. Experiment 2 manipulated whether participants focus on the effect, and hence the A-E interval duration, or the next fixation cross, and hence the total trial duration. Results again favor the importance of the total trial duration. As a consequence, previous interpretations should be reconsidered, and we here put forward an alternative motivational account as a more general explanation for delayed-effect costs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Navigation relies on the integration of both allocentric (world-centered) and egocentric (navigator-centered) spatial cues. An influential real-world navigational task dissociated allocentric place learning from egocentric path integration, highlighting the decline in allocentric cue use associated with cognitive aging. This report describes a novel computer-based replication of this task, designed as a remote test of navigational ability, that also addresses potential confounds in the original task, including tighter control of spatial cue competition. In Experiment 1a, participants learned a location signaled either by landmark cues in the absence of a stable starting position (allocentric), distance and direction from the starting position in the absence of landmarks (egocentric), or a combination of the two (control). In the allocentric condition, participants exhibited lower accuracy, greater reorientation, and more complex paths compared to the control and egocentric conditions. Experiment 1b employed the same design but featured an egocentric condition with unstable landmarks that did not predict the target location. In Experiment 1b, egocentric condition accuracy was equivalent to the allocentric condition and lower compared to Experiment 1a's egocentric condition. Additionally, in Experiment 1b's egocentric condition, participants took more complex paths and reoriented more to the unstable landmarks. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated findings from Experiments 1a and 1b, indicating their reliability. These data suggest that path complexity is associated with navigational error and underscore the benefits of integrating different sources of information during navigation. Cross-experiment comparisons also show how the presence of unstable visual cues can lead to the adoption of unsuitable strategic approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).