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

Students are often taught that testing themselves will help them retain new material. Less well known, however, is that testing oneself before learning can also produce benefits (the "pretesting effect"). Prior studies have indicated that the semantic relatedness between the provided information (cue) and the answer (target) may be critical for this effect. Here, we investigated this by measuring the trifold relationship between cue, target, and guess using continuous relatedness measures. In Experiment 1, participants learned cue-target word pairs by studying or generating guesses based on the cue word before taking a test on both cue-target pairs and the original cue-guess combinations. We found a robust difference in accuracy favoring pretesting over studying, regardless of cue-target relatedness. In Experiment 2, we further examined if errorless generation contributed to the pretesting effect by adding a condition in which cue and target were present, but subjects still generated a related word. Cue-target memory was better in both the pretesting and generation conditions than the study condition. In both studies, while cue-target relatedness benefitted accuracy overall, these benefits did not interact with pretesting or generation pair conditions. Importantly, we observed an interaction between the cue-target semantic relatedness and guess-target semantic relatedness only in the pretesting condition, demonstrating a benefit for (incidentally) high relatedness between guesses and targets when cue-target relatedness was low and an impairment when cue-target relatedness was high, likely reflecting interference between target and guess. Our results illuminate the importance of considering guess quality in uncovering the mechanisms in pretesting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In alphabetic writing systems, letters and sounds have systematic mapping relations. Words that display common letter-sound relations are high in consistency (e.g., "speak," "weak"; consistent words), whereas those that use less common relations are low in consistency ("break"; inconsistent words). This study tested how letter-sound consistency affects word learning (Experiment 1) and forgetting (Experiment 2), considering various aspects of lexical knowledge, including orthography (O), phonology (P), semantics (S), and bindings between them (P-O, S-O, S-P). Eighty-six native English-speaking adults learned novel meanings for eight spoken pseudowords and then read sentences containing the written forms of these pseudowords. Half the pseudowords were consistent, whereas the other half were inconsistent. Knowledge of the pseudowords was tested immediately after learning (Experiment 1; N = 86) and with a delay (M = 77 days; Experiment 2; N = 58). Results showed that inconsistency impaired learning of most aspects of lexical knowledge (P, P-O, S-O, and S-P). After the delay, participants also showed more forgetting of P, but interestingly less forgetting of S-P, for inconsistent relative to consistent items. Together, these findings revealed that lexical development is a complex, interactive, and dynamic process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent gesture studies investigating how speakers linearize events in which one entity acts on another have claimed that the preferred order is [subject/agent]-[object/patient]-[verb/action] (SOV/APV) irrespective of language background (Schouwstra et al., 2022; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2008). However, these studies have only tested speakers of languages in which the subject/agent preferentially precedes the object/patient. We provide a stronger test of this cognitive-universal hypothesis using elicited pantomime (plus a spoken-language comparison task) with speakers of Truku Seediq, which favors the typologically rare VOS/VPA word order, and English-speaking controls. While the English speakers' pantomimes largely employed the expected SOV/APV and SVO/AVP orders, the Truku Seediq speakers produced almost no APV sequences. The results strengthen the evidence for processing effects that promote SVO/AVP order under certain conditions, and further support the claim that the habitual use of a language may cumulatively influence speakers' cognitive activities as they are interpreting the world. The divergent preferences for the two typologically different languages suggest that language experience can change conceptual accessibility, especially in terms of action saliency, in speakers' cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Metacognition is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes, with higher order mechanisms assessing the performance of lower level cognitive operations to determine subjective confidence. An open question is whether metacognitive capacity is domain-general, akin to a conductor overseeing various sections of an orchestra, or whether it is inherently coupled with each domain, resembling a collection of specialized musical directors for each instrument group. Previous studies attempting to address this question have suffered from methodological drawbacks, such as a lack of control over cognitive performance and low statistical power. In this confirmatory, preregistered study, we addressed this gap by testing metacognitive ability in visual perceptual, episodic memory, and semantic memory domains using a newly developed adaptive "trivia" task spanning judgments about nutrition and global economics. We found substantive correlations in metacognitive bias and efficiency across domains, even when controlling for cognitive ability, suggesting up to 15%-20% shared variance in metacognition across different modalities. Surprisingly, however, we found the lowest correlation in metacognition between the two semantic memory domains, despite these tasks being matched on performance and surface-level features. Our results broadly support the existence of a metacognitive "g-factor," excluding several important methodological confounds, while also highlighting the importance of further research into interindividual differences in metacognitive priors which may explain the lower correlations between the different semantic memory domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

How do people recognize objects they have encountered previously? Cognitive models of recognition memory aim to explain overt behavior using latent psychological processes, such as true recognition and pure guessing. Validation studies assess whether the mechanisms underlying cognitive models properly reflect the psychological processes they aim to explain. The present study provides such a validation study for models describing paired-word recognition-a paradigm in which participants have to categorize randomly constructed word pairs. Specifically, introducing a strength manipulation (Experiment 1), presenting certain words more often during study, a base-rate manipulation of response categories (Experiment 2), presenting certain pair types more often during test, a base-rate manipulation of overall frequencies of old and new words (Experiment 3), and a payoff manipulation, differentially incentivizing correct responses (Experiment 4), we assessed the validity of general recognition theory, a multidimensional signal detection theory model, and the paired two-high threshold model, a discrete-state model. Both models captured the strength manipulation as expected on mnemonic parameters describing memory sensitivity and detection probability. Unexpectedly, the base-rate and payoff manipulations affected (strategic) memory retrieval within the discrete-state model (Experiments 2-4) and both strategic retrieval (Experiment 2) and decision boundaries (Experiments 3 and 4) within the continuous model. Implications for model validity and the future use of these models for paired-word recognition are discussed. (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).

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).

An unresolved debate questions whether speakers tend to use less specific referential expressions, like pronouns, when the referent is predictable within the context. Numerous studies test this question with implicit causality (IC), which elicits a strong expectation for the implicit cause to be mentioned. Using fragment completion tasks, several studies found that speakers do not use more pronouns for the implicit cause (e.g., Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010; Rohde & Kehler, 2014). However, a recent study found an effect of implicit causality on pronoun use, using a verbal story retelling paradigm with a rich context (Weatherford & Arnold, 2021). What accounts for these different findings? Two major methodological differences are that the storytelling task engaged participants in social interaction and used more richly contextualized stimuli than the fragment completion task. The present study further tests whether fragment completion tasks are capable of detecting the effect of implicit causality on pronoun use with elaborated stimuli and when there is social interaction. We found that implicit causality did indeed guide pronoun use, but only in a context that is socially interactive. These findings suggest that predictability increases pronoun use, but observing this effect is more likely in tasks where the producer is engaged in the discourse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When conveying a message to an interlocutor, speakers need to code concepts in lexical expressions, a process known as lexical retrieval. There is evidence that speakers can take into account the dialectal background of their interlocutor to tailor their lexical retrieval; for instance, our pilot experiment showed that participants, when asked to guess the defined expression according to a definition, were more likely to produce American English (AE) expressions (e.g., apartment instead of flat) when the definition was spoken by an AE interlocutor than a British English (BE) interlocutor. It is possible that such an interlocutor effect arises from a top-down interlocutor model, from bottom-up accent details, or a combination of both. This registered report aimed to address this issue with two experiments. In Experiment 1, we observed that the interlocutor effect on lexical retrieval did not differ regardless of whether a definition was presented by the interlocutor via speaking (with accent details) or writing (without accent details), suggesting that the effect arises from top-down interlocutor modeling instead of bottom-up accent details. Experiment 2 interleaved two interlocutors with different dialects, one providing a spoken filler definition and the other a written target definition. Participants used more AE expressions for target definitions given by an AE interlocutor than a BE interlocutor, suggesting they maintained concurrent models for interlocutors and used them to retrieve dialect-congruent expressions. These findings highlight top-down influences of the communicative context in language production. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When people communicate, they use a combination of modalities-speech, gesture, and eye gaze-to engage and transmit information to an addressee. Spatial deictic communication is a paradigmatic case, with spatial demonstratives (this/that) frequently co-occurring with eye gaze and pointing gestures to draw the attention of an addressee to an object location (e.g., this cup, that chair). Yet the effectiveness of these individual modalities in guiding attention has not been established. In two experiments, we manipulated pointing, gazing, and spatial demonstratives to establish their relative and combined effectiveness in directing attention to a specific referent. Participants saw an image (Experiments 1 and 2) or a short video clip (Experiment 2) with a person (agent) sitting behind a table, describing (this, that), gazing, and/or pointing at the items placed proximally or distally relative to the agent. All three modalities individually affected which of the two objects participants thought the person in the picture was referring to. However, pointing was the dominant cue to referent choice, with demonstratives on their own acting as a relatively weak spatial deictic cue. Overall, the effect of spatial demonstratives (Experiments 1 and 2) and gaze (Experiment 2) on attention to a referent was enhanced when coupled with pointing, both when targeting the distal and proximal positions. The results help to illuminate why spatial deictic communication is usually multimodal, with individual modalities contributing different communicative functions in the act of spatial deixis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).