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

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).

In Gutkin et al. (2024), we studied traditional models of recognition memory, such as the two-high-threshold model and signal detection theory, using the benefits of multinomial processing tree models to quantify the effects of both ordinal and continuous variables. Simulations found that including relevant variables, such as response times (RTs) and confidence levels (CLs), significantly improved the estimation accuracy of model parameters and the power of model selection in fitting data from a recognition memory experiment. However, when applying these extended models, we found that no single model was suitable for all subjects. Thus, in the present study, we explored whether recognition memory is best represented as a continuous or discrete process by proposing a hybrid model that extends the original Atkinson-Juola (AJ) model (Atkinson & Juola, 1973, 1974; Juola et al., 1971). Data were sourced from a recognition memory experiment conducted by Juola et al. (2019), involving manipulations of relative target frequencies and measuring RTs and CLs. Our findings indicate that the extended AJ model provides a superior fit for most participants compared to purely discrete or continuous models. Additionally, the patterns of CLs and RTs align with the AJ model's assumptions about their distributions. Despite these insights, there remains notable variability in cognitive processing and decision-making strategies across individuals. Therefore, there is still a need for a more general model, as suggested in the present article, that could accommodate the diverse strategies and individual differences influencing search, decision making, and response processes underlying recognition memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Frequency effects, defined as a bias toward more frequently rewarded but less valuable options, have traditionally been viewed as maladaptive decision-making deficits. In the present study, we used a within-subject design in which participants completed a four-option reinforcement learning task twice, once under a baseline condition and once with a reward-frequency manipulation, to test whether better baseline learning predicts greater or lesser susceptibility to frequency-based biases. Participants were first trained on two fixed option pairs and then transferred their knowledge to novel pairings in a testing phase. Across conditions, higher training accuracy generally predicted higher testing accuracy, with one critical exception: on trials where a more valuable option was pitted against a more frequently rewarded but less valuable alternative, participants with higher training accuracy exhibited a stronger bias toward the more frequent option. Moreover, baseline optimal choice rates in these specific trials were unrelated to-and even slightly negatively correlated with-optimal choice rates under the frequency condition. Computational modeling further showed that participants with better baseline learning performance were better fit by frequency-sensitive models in the frequency condition and they weighed frequency-based processing more heavily than value-based processing. Overall, these findings suggest that frequency effects, rather than reflect flawed learning, manifest more strongly in individuals with better baseline learning performance. This seemingly irrational bias may, under conditions of uncertainty, represent a flexible, adaptive strategy that emerges among the best learners when value-based approaches are costly or unreliable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In German, diacritical marks distinguish between vowel sounds in print (e.g., "o" pronounced /o/ vs. "ö" pronounced /ø/). Unlike in Spanish, where diacritics primarily indicate lexical stress, omitting diacritics in German (e.g., Kröte [toad] → Krote) leads to longer word identification times compared with intact words. This suggests separate letter representations for diacritical and nondiacritical vowels in German. Current models of visual word recognition assume distinct letter representations for diacritical and nondiacritical vowels in German (Ziegler et al., 2000), but it remains unclear whether the reading cost differs when a diacritic is added versus omitted. We conducted three semantic categorization experiments to examine whether the presence of an added diacritic in a nondiacritical word (e.g., Schwan [swan] → Schwän) incurs a greater lexical-semantic cost than its omission (e.g., Kröte → Krote) in German and Finnish, another language where diacritical vowels signal distinct pronunciations. In noisy-channel models, adding a diacritic makes the percept less similar to the base word than omitting one, thus predicting a larger cost. In contrast, abstractionist models assume rapid activation of abstract letter representations, predicting a negligible asymmetry. Results were similar in German and Finnish. First, both types of misspellings showed a reading cost relative to the intact words. Second, the reading cost was larger for the addition than for the omission of diacritics, placing new constraints on the orthographic front-end of models of visual word recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent evidence shows that saccade target selection in second-language (L2) English reading is similar to that in native-language (L1) English reading. However, only bilinguals with languages belonging to the same writing system were examined in these studies. The present study investigated saccade target selection and whether it changes with L2 proficiency in cross-writing-system bilinguals, specifically Chinese-English bilinguals. In Study 1, we analyzed an L2 reading data set of Chinese-English bilinguals. For both high- and low-L2-proficiency bilinguals, we observed an inverted U-shaped preferred viewing location curve and found a word length effect on the initial landing position, suggesting that bilinguals selected the word central position as the saccade target. However, when the launch site was five letters or farther from the target word, the PVL curve peaked at the word beginning. In Study 2, we manipulated target word frequency, parafoveal information validity, and L2 proficiency in a factorial experiment. A significant three-way interaction was found in outgoing saccade length. Low-proficiency bilinguals exhibited longer outgoing saccades from high-frequency than low-frequency target words, but only when parafoveal information was valid. With the increase of L2 proficiency, this interaction ceased to exist. These results suggest decreased reliance on ongoing processing for saccade target selection as L2 proficiency increases. Combining the two studies, we found for Chinese-English bilinguals' L2 reading a specific processing-based strategy that varied with L2 proficiency and a universal word-based strategy. These findings provide new insights into reading strategy and eye movement control in cross-writing-system bilinguals' L2 reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

While numerous studies have examined how speakers understand newly coined words and novel figurative expressions, it remains largely unknown how grammatically creative sentences are processed in real time. In two reading experiments, we investigated how speakers comprehend instances of valency coercion, where a verb combines with noncanonical grammatical arguments (e.g., Frank sneezed his napkin off the table). Experiment 1 (N = 80), which included a preregistered replication (N = 120), employed the "maze" variant of the self-paced reading task. We found that coerced sentences, compared with prototypical (uncreative) controls, produced immediate processing difficulty after the verb, which was, however, rapidly alleviated at the prepositional phrase. Experiment 2 (N = 55), using eye-movement recordings, showed that the processing difficulty in coerced sentences was more successfully resolved than in fully anomalous controls, and that this resolution occurred both at temporally early and later stages of processing. Our results demonstrate that verb argument structure composition is flexible and computed during real-time incremental sentence comprehension. Comprehenders understand creative verb-argument combinations by rapidly integrating information from the verb and its clausal context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).