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

We tested two competing hypotheses about the nature of multifeatured object representations in visual working memory. One is that all object features are integrated into an object file. The other is that locations are critical for maintaining the bindings of visual features of an object. We developed an experimental paradigm that bridges the visual working memory and object-file literatures. Several multifeatured objects were presented simultaneously, followed by a retention interval in which placeholders either moved or not. Participants were then given one feature of a randomly chosen object as a cue and prompted to report the other two features of the same object. Applying multinomial process tree models to evaluate the competing accounts of how multifeatured objects are represented in memory, we found evidence supporting the object-file theory and challenging the location-binding hypothesis. We conclude that bindings of features within the object can be maintained after motion. Furthermore, pairwise bindings between color and shape are robust against motion, implying that location is not essential for visual feature bindings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Strategic monitoring is the heightening of monitoring in relevant contexts where prospective memory (PM) targets are expected and the relaxation of monitoring in irrelevant contexts. There is ample evidence for strategic monitoring, but most studies instructed participants about relevant contexts (e.g., PM targets will appear in words but not in nonwords). In Experiments 1 and 2, we examined whether strategic monitoring emerges without such instructions when participants must learn that words are the PM-relevant context. Participants monitored more in words than in nonwords, demonstrating experience-guided strategic monitoring. However, this pattern emerged even before the first PM target, suggesting a word-monitoring bias. In Experiment 3, the PM-relevant context was shifted to nonwords so that evidence for experience-guided strategic monitoring could not be attributed to a word-monitoring bias. Participants monitored equally in words and nonwords. Collectively, Experiments 1-3 revealed no clear evidence of experience-guided strategic monitoring independent of a word-monitoring bias. Experiment 4 was identical to Experiment 3 except that participants were directly instructed that PM targets would occur in nonwords. There was only short-lived evidence of instructed strategic monitoring. Our findings cast doubt on the possibility that strategic monitoring can arise through experience (i.e., via the learning of associations between contextual cues and PM relevance), suggesting that strategic monitoring may require instructions. Additionally, we found a previously undocumented word-monitoring bias. Understanding this bias is important for instructed and experience-guided paradigms, as it can mimic strategic monitoring when words are the relevant context or obscure evidence of strategic monitoring when nonwords are the relevant context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Speakers sometimes produce lexical errors, such as saying "salt" instead of "pepper." This study aimed to better understand the origin of lexical errors by assessing whether they arise from a hasty selection and premature decision to speak (premature selection hypothesis) or from momentary attentional disengagement from the task (attentional lapse hypothesis). We analyzed data from a speeded picture naming task (Lampe et al., 2023) and investigated whether lexical errors are produced as fast as target (i.e., correct) responses, thus arising from premature selection, or whether they are produced more slowly than target responses, thus arising from lapses of attention. Using ex-Gaussian analyses, we found that lexical errors were slower than targets in the tail, but not in the normal part of the response time distribution, with the tail effect primarily resulting from errors that were not coordinates, that is, members of the target's semantic category. Moreover, we compared the coordinate errors and target responses in terms of their word-intrinsic properties and found that they were overall more frequent, shorter, and acquired earlier than targets. Given the present findings, we conclude that coordinate errors occur due to a premature selection but in the context of intact attentional control, following the same lexical constraints as targets, while other errors, given the variability in their nature, may vary in their origin, with one potential source being lapses of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

It is widely accepted that upright faces are processed more holistically than inverted faces, but there is limited evidence on how face orientation affects holistic processing in conflict tasks and how this differs in arrow and gaze processing. To address these gaps, we devised a novel arrow-gaze Stroop task involving both arrow and gaze judgments. Our results show that face orientation does not influence the congruency effect in this Stroop task. However, the congruency effect is significantly stronger for gaze judgments than for arrow judgments. We used hierarchical Bayesian estimation to evaluate three conflict drift-diffusion models-the diffusion model for conflict tasks, the dual-stage two-phase model, and the shrinking spotlight model (SSP)-to examine holistic cognitive control mechanisms. Our model-based analysis reveals that the SSP outperforms the diffusion model for conflict and dual-stage two-phase models. Representational similarity analysis of the SSP model parameters between gaze and arrow judgments suggests two key findings: (a) Feature-based processing of both arrow and gaze tasks, along with conflict-related factors, explains the similar congruency effects observed across both face orientations, while the processing speed of relevant stimulus attributes impacts overall performance, and (b) there are both shared and dissociable attentional effects between gaze and arrow processing. These findings provide new insights into the shared computational mechanisms underlying social and nonsocial cognitive control processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated the assumptions of prototype and exemplar models of human category learning, with a particular focus on the impact of category frequency. We used baseline and recency-weighted variants of prototype and exemplar models to examine the computational mechanisms underlying categorization decisions when one category was presented more frequently than the other. We employed extensive sets of stimuli derived from bivariate normal distributions and manipulated category frequency during training across four experiments using different category structures. In the transfer phases, participants classified novel stimuli. Across all studies, the results revealed a significant frequency effect, with participants showing a preference for categorizing novel items as members of the more frequently encountered category. This preference extended to transfer stimuli outside the trained region of the stimulus space. Model-based analyses indicated that the recency-weighted generalized context model exemplar model, which computes summed similarity via a Decay reinforcement learning rule, consistently outperformed other models in fitting the data and accurately reproducing the observed classification patterns across all experiments. Both prototype models failed to account for the observed frequency effects. While the baseline generalized context model was able to account for frequency effects, it did not capture recency effects. These findings suggest that relative category frequency influences human behavior when categorizing novel items. The computational modeling results revealed that evidence for categorization decisions is recency-weighted and accumulative rather than averaged. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

There is evidence that asking people to predict their own memory performance during learning (immediate judgments of learning, JOLs) can alter memory. Changes in the use of learning strategies have been proposed to contribute to these reactive effects of JOLs. This study addresses the impact of making JOLs on the use of learning strategies and the contribution of learning strategies to JOL reactivity. Across six experiments, participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and did or did not make JOLs during study, completed a cued-recall test, and reported the learning strategies they had used for each word pair. When we manipulated the requirement to make JOLs between participants, making JOLs enhanced memory for related pairs and impaired memory for unrelated pairs. Further, the learning strategies participants used differed across the JOL and no-JOL groups, and these differences mediated the detrimental effects of making JOLs on memory for unrelated pairs. In contrast, when we manipulated the requirement to make JOLs within participants, making JOLs enhanced recall performance for related pairs but did not impact recall for unrelated pairs or the use of learning strategies. Overall, our findings indicate that changes in the use of learning strategies underlie detrimental effects of making JOL on memory for unrelated pairs but only play a minor role in positive effects of making JOLs for related word pairs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Performance in immediate serial recall of verbal lists-often referred to as simple span task-is improved by longer free time between presentation of successive items. Performance in complex span tasks, in which presentation of items is interleaved by work on a distractor task, is improved by reducing the cognitive load imposed by the distractor task. The cognitive load decreases as the proportion of free time between successive items is increased. The present experiments compare the beneficial effects of free time in simple and complex span tasks. Increasing free time between items improved memory in both task versions by the same time-accuracy function; the detrimental effect of processing distracting information in complex span is unrelated to that effect. Therefore, the effect of cognitive load in complex span can be explained by the combination of beneficial effects of free time and detrimental effects of distractor interference. An analysis of the free-time benefit by serial position reveals differences between simple and complex spans that suggest that free time additionally benefits complex but not simple spans through strengthening episodic memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Language comprehension relies on integrating the perceived utterance with prior expectations. Previous investigations of expectations about sentence structure (the structural prior) have found that comprehenders often interpret rare constructions nonliterally. However, this work has mostly relied on analytic languages like English, where word order is the main way to indicate syntactic relations in the sentence. This raises the possibility that the structural prior over word order is not a universal part of the sentence processing toolkit, but rather a tool acquired only by speakers of languages where word order has special importance as the main source of syntactic information in the sentence. Moving away from English to make conclusions about more general cognitive strategies (Blasi et al., 2022), we investigate whether the structural prior over word order is a part of language processing more universally using Hindi and Russian, synthetic languages with flexible word order. We conducted two studies in Hindi (Ns = 50, 57, the latter preregistered) and three studies with the same materials, translated, in Russian (Ns = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical word order (subject-object-verb in Hindi, subject-verb-object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object-subject-verb in Hindi, object-verb-subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Predicting others' feelings enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socioemotional environment, in which they observe reliable patterns in how adults shift from one emotion (e.g., anger) to another (e.g., sadness). If infants learn about emotion transitions by observing the adults around them, we expect that the way infants process emotion transitions will reflect both average patterns seen in adults as well as specific patterns of their primary caregiver. We measured 4- to 10-month-old American infants' (N = 70) pupillary responses to emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. As expected, infants were attuned to average adult patterns of emotion transitions, showing greater pupillary synchrony for more common transitions. Infants also showed sensitivity to their own primary caregiver's specific pattern of emotion transitions, showing similar pupillary responses to other infants in the sample whose caregivers show similar patterns. These findings suggest that infants learn about emotion dynamics by attending to both average and specific statistical patterns in the people around them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The shift from handwriting to digital typing as the dominant form of written communication has led to a decrease in handwriting proficiency. This trend is particularly evident in opaque writing systems, such as Chinese, where speakers increasingly experience "character amnesia," the inability to (fully) handwrite a character despite being able to recognize it. In this study, we investigated whether prior exposure to a phonetic or semantic radical of a character helps to subsequently alleviate amnesia in handwriting the character. In three online experiments, participants were first exposed to a prime character that shares a phonetic radical, a semantic radical, or no radical with a target character (or, in Experiment 2, exposed to a stand-alone radical); then they handwrote the target character according to a dictation prompt. Participants reported less character amnesia in handwriting the target character if they had previously been exposed to a phonetic or semantic radical, either as part of a prime character or as a stand-alone radical. Furthermore, the priming effect of the semantic radical was similar regardless of whether the prime had a transparent semantic radical or nontransparent semantic radical. These findings suggest that a potential cause of character amnesia in Chinese is incomplete orthographic activation in radicals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).