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

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).

We investigated how anticipated naming difficulty affects voluntary language choice and switching behavior in three experiments. L2 speakers of English (E1: 87 native Dutch speakers, E2: 105 native Dutch speakers, and E3: 65 native Indonesian speakers) performed an online picture-naming task with free language choice. We used image degradation to manipulate the early, prelexical stages of word production to be easy (intact image) or difficult (degraded image). In Experiment 2, we also manipulated word frequency. We hypothesized participants would use English (their nondominant language) and switch languages less on degraded- versus intact-image trials. Participants took longer to name degraded than intact images and lower than higher frequency words, as predicted. They also responded faster on English trials (reverse dominance effect) and language repeat trials (voluntary switch cost) and used English more for higher than lower frequency words (all ps < .001). Crucially, though, results refuted our other predictions: There was no effect of image degradation on language choice or switch choice (p > .05). This suggests that early prelexical sources of naming difficulty do not affect voluntary language selection. These data support modular theories of language production, meaning language decisions at the lexical stage occur independently from the visual processing or conceptual stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Context influences how people cope with distraction. For example, a parent might "tune out" a child's voice more while reading than while cooking. The contextual boundaries of control processes that enable people to cope with distraction over relatively long (e.g., minutes) timescales, however, remain unclear, especially in cross-modal tasks. Therefore, we conducted three experiments with a prime-probe task (N = 144) to investigate the boundaries of a laboratory index of these control processes called the list-wide proportion congruency effect (LWPCE). Specifically, we investigated whether (a) sensory modalities on their own or (b) task sets based on sensory modalities serve as boundaries for the LWPCE. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that the control processes underlying the LWPCE transfer from trials with auditory distractors to trials with visual distractors only when the task structure biases participants to think of auditory and visual stimuli as belonging to the same task. Experiment 3 revealed that participants exhibit such a bias when they cannot classify most of the trials as "purely visual" or "purely auditory." These findings support the view that task sets serve as boundaries for the LWPCE. They also reveal the precise conditions under which control processes transfer across different sensory modalities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Language control is the process that manages cross-language interference, helping multilinguals to successfully adapt their language choice to a given linguistic environment. Traditionally, language control has been investigated using language-switching experiments that rely on cued picture naming. However, in real-life settings, language choice is not always externally imposed, and language production involves complex and varied syntactic constructions beyond the single-word level. Here, we present findings from French-English bilinguals who switched between languages from one sentence to the other, parting from an action description task. We compared findings from two linguistic contexts: one wherein participants could freely choose when to switch (voluntary language switching) and one wherein they were told when to switch (cued language switching). Overall, our reaction time and filled pause analyses showed no significant switch costs during cued language switching. During voluntary language switching, we observed significant switch costs in second language and a repetition cost in first language. Our findings contrast with those encountered in single-word production experiments and highlight the importance of studying bilingual language control in ecologically valid environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A reconstruction-of-order task illuminated the dynamics and strategies that underlie serial order recall. An initial benchmark experiment, either with no variation in spatial positions or with spatial positions coinciding with temporal positions, yielded bowed symmetrical serial position functions in each case, consistent with both simple chaining and simple positional coding models. In contrast, these simple models were challenged by two additional experiments, which orthogonally varied temporal and spatial positions. These experiments yielded large performance differences between recalling temporal and spatial information. In the temporal condition, participants attempted to reconstruct the temporal order of words that were positioned alphabetically within a vertical array. In the spatial condition, participants attempted to reconstruct the spatial positions of words presented in a temporal sequence based on their alphabetical order. After viewing each list, all the words appeared alphabetically, and participants reconstructed the order of the words according to their instructed condition. Compared to temporal recall, spatial recall exhibited superior performance and a more bowed symmetrical serial position function. Analyses showed the effects of temporal contiguity in the spatial condition and spatial contiguity in the temporal condition. These findings suggest the theoretical conclusion that participants do not focus on the words' identities but rather on the temporal-spatial pattern in which the words occur during the study display (i.e., the temporal sequence of the spatial locations in which the words are shown). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A now well-documented finding is that nonwords created by transposing two internal letters (e.g., vetrical, vercital) are perceived as being more similar to their base word (i.e., vertical) than nonwords created by substituting other letters for the transposed letters (e.g., vefsical, versifal). Most of the relevant research on transposed letter (TL) effects has involved a masked priming procedure with a lexical decision task. The results have typically been explained in terms of the interactions between the orthographic coding process and the lexical access process. The present research was an investigation of TL effects when the TL nonword is a target in both lexical decision tasks and same-different matching tasks in an attempt to determine whether the effect patterns could be explained in a way that is reasonably similar to how current orthographic coding models explain TL effects in masked priming experiments. Essentially parallel results of large TL effects for consonant-consonant transpositions and smaller, but highly significant, TL effects for vowel-vowel transpositions were observed in the two tasks for both adjacent and nonadjacent transpositions. The implications of our data pattern, particularly the large consonant-vowel effect size difference, for accounts of the relevant processes are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).