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

In dual-language contexts, bilinguals often switch between their languages. How they do this, and how they control their languages during switching, can depend on the nature of the interactional context and the task (comprehension or production). Here, we examined the influence of the immediate and overall language context on language control. First, we examined how language control differs between producing language switches in response to cues, producing switches voluntarily, and comprehending switches. Second, we examined whether language control changes after a change in a bilingual's daily-life overall environment. To do this, we conducted a longitudinal study with Mandarin-English bilinguals who moved from China (L1-dominant environment) to the United Kingdom (bilingual/L2-dominant environment) and with a control group staying in China. Participants completed three tasks twice (7 months apart): cued picture naming (cues indicating language choice), voluntary picture naming (free language choice), and comprehension of spoken words. Language control differed between the three tasks. Participants showed greater language-switching costs in cued production than during voluntary production and comprehension. Furthermore, only cued production showed that using two languages was more costly than using one (mixing costs). However, we found no evidence that a change in the language environment resulted in changes in language control. This suggests a bilingual's language control mechanisms adapt to the immediate context they are communicating in but are perhaps not shaped as strongly by the overall language environment they live in. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical learning is the process of extracting regularities from the environment. Although sequential cross-modal regularities are ubiquitous (e.g., the sight of a falling ball followed by the sound of impact), previous research has failed to demonstrate that such learning occurs between sensory modalities. This has led to the view that sequential statistical learning is modality specific. The present study investigates factors that may determine statistical learning of cross-modal sequences. In the first experiment, participants viewed a stream of meaningless visual fractals and synthetic auditory stimuli. The sequence of stimuli could be grouped into either unimodal or cross-modal pairs based on their transitional probabilities. Using implicit and explicit measures of learning, we found that participants learned only the unimodal pairs. In the second experiment, pairs were presented in separate unimodal and cross-modal blocks. The cross-modal blocks alternated between visual and auditory modalities, allowing participants to anticipate the upcoming modality. This manipulation enabled significant implicit statistical learning for the cross-modal pairs. This suggests that the predictability of modality transitions facilitates appropriate deployment of attention across sensory modalities, which is crucial for learning cross-modal sequential contingencies. In the third experiment, we used audiovisual stimuli with semantic content. Here, participants were able to implicitly learn and explicitly recognize statistical regularities between cross-modal pairs even when the upcoming modality was unpredictable. Together, these findings challenge the view that sequential statistical learning is strictly modality specific, showing that it occurs when sensory-level limitations are bypassed by attentional cues or when learning engages higher level semantic representations shared across modalities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect refers to the processing of the magnitude of numbers activating mental spatial representation, thus affecting the selection of responses in different spatial positions. In this study, we used a spatial-semantic Stroop task (Experiments 1a, 1b), word-color Stroop task (Experiment 2), and Flanker-like task (Experiment 3) to explore whether inhibitory control could modulate the observed SNARC effect. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the SNARC effect was observed in the Stroop-congruent condition but decreased or disappeared in the Stroop-incongruent condition. In Experiment 2, the SNARC effect occurred in the low-interference condition (i.e., word task) but disappeared in the high-interference condition (i.e., color task). Similar results were obtained in Experiment 3, in which participants responded to numbers attached on the central letter "Q" with "O" distractors (low-interference condition) or the central letter "O" with "Q" distractors (high-interference condition). These findings indicate that the enhanced cognitive control triggered by Stroop or Flanker interference aided in resolving the stimulus-response conflict in SNARC-incompatible trials, demonstrating that inhibitory control modulates the SNARC effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The term attribute framing bias refers to individuals' tendency to evaluate objects or events more favorably when they are framed positively (e.g., "75% success") than when the same information is framed negatively (e.g., "25% failure"). Previous findings show that individuals evaluate information more favorably when asked questions with positive valence (e.g., "how good?") compared with questions with negative valence (e.g., "how bad?"). The current article examines whether and to what extent question valence attenuates attribute framing bias when information is displayed in text and graphs. Three experiments consistently show a significant effect of attribute framing with more favorable evaluations for positive compared with negative framing, and an effect of question valence with more favorable evaluations for positive compared with negative question valence. Critically, while question valence reduced attribute framing bias for textual presentation, it eliminated attribute framing bias when the information was presented graphically. We propose that attentional mechanisms account for these findings. Specifically, attribute framing bias reflects an attention shift toward the positive or negative frame presented explicitly in the scenario, while neglecting the implicit complementary information. A question with conflicting valence shifts attention to the implicit information, consequently reducing the bias. The attenuating effect of question valence is stronger and eliminates the bias, when information is presented graphically because the complementary attribute is visually available. We discuss the implications of using question valence to mitigate framing effects and biases in judgment and decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Top-down control in choosing appropriate actions is a key ability of human cognition. While target-related foreknowledge has long been studied, recent research in various domains has focused on our ability to use foreknowledge about distractions stored in working memory. However, previous research has exclusively investigated distractor foreknowledge derived from stimulus features such as location or color. The present study examined whether the effective use of distractor foreknowledge can also be achieved when it is based solely on response-related information. We tested the effectiveness of distractor foreknowledge in a Flanker task by varying the type of foreknowledge cue. In two experiments (N₁ = 117, N₂ = 119), participants received either stimulus-related cues (i.e., the shape of the distractors was presented before the Flanker display) or response-related cues (i.e., the associated response of the distractors was cued before the Flanker display), both with 100% validity. Performance was compared with a control condition with no foreknowledge. We found that Flanker effects related to response interference were reduced irrespective of the foreknowledge cue type across both experiments. These results extend prior work on distractor templates, which have traditionally focused on stimulus features, by showing that response-related distractor representations can benefit response selection. We interpret the results against the background of the common coding principle. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Categorization is a fundamental human skill that involves assigning objects to categories based on their features. Within each category, object features can vary and correlate, giving rise to within-category feature distributions. Processing such distributional information can, in principle, improve category learning. However, the extent to which people actually make use of within-category feature distributions during categorization remains unclear due to mixed empirical evidence. To investigate this question, we conducted two category learning and transfer experiments in which the variances and correlations of features within categories were manipulated based on simulation-based optimal experimental design. Using cognitive modeling within an exemplar-similarity framework, we compared a cognitive process that ignores within-category feature distributions (Euclidean similarity) with one that considers them (Mahalanobis similarity). Across both experiments (both Ns = 43), most participants' transfer phase behavior was best captured by the simpler Euclidean model, indicating that they largely disregarded within-category feature distributions. Nevertheless, a minority of participants categorized the test stimuli in line with the Mahalanobis model, albeit less consistently, suggesting that they considered distributional information to some extent. Overall, the findings indicate that similarity-based categorization processes are generally insensitive to the statistical distribution from which objects are drawn, possibly because estimating such distributions imposes substantial computational costs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Bayesian reasoning requires the processing of data in probabilistic situations to revise risk estimations. Research has shown that this is difficult when data are presented as single-event probabilities; the multiplicative combination of priors and likelihoods often is disregarded, resulting in erroneous strategies such as prior neglect or averaging. Proportions (relative frequencies) are computationally equivalent to probabilities: They also require a multiplicative combination. However, proportions are connected to natural mental representations (ratio sense). More specifically, mental representations of nested proportions (e.g., 70% of 20%) allow for mental operations that correspond to multiplicative combinations. In three experimental studies, we avoided numerical calculations and focused on the conceptual understanding underlying Bayesian reasoning by administering tasks with bar chart representations without numbers. In all studies, we compared two conditions: The tasks were verbally framed either in terms of proportions or in terms of single-event probabilities. The studies revealed that the framing had no substantial effect on whether participants combined priors and likelihoods or neglected part of the information. However, the findings supported our hypothesis that the framing impacts how the information is combined. In line with our hypothesis, proportions increased the correct Bayesian judgment and reduced an incorrect averaging strategy-a strategy for combining information that was predominant with single-event probabilities. Thus, proportions appear as a natural view on combining information in Bayesian situations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Some stimuli (e.g., objects, scenes, faces) are consistently remembered better than others across individuals, due to variations in memorability (the stimulus-intrinsic property that determines ease-of-encoding into visual long-term memory). Within visual working memory (VWM), memorable stimuli enjoy a dual benefit: they are stored more efficiently (observers can store more memorable than forgettable stimuli) and are more competitive (when memorable and forgettable stimuli need to "compete" for limited VWM resources, the memorable stimuli are more likely to "win" access to those resources). Given the link between attention and VWM, we examined attention as a candidate for the source of the competitive benefit. In experiment 1, we investigated if observers selectively attend to memorable stimuli when encoded along with forgettable during a VWM task. Using a letter report probe task that enabled us to index where attention was allocated during encoding, we found that attention was drawn to memorable faces, but not via automatic attentional capture. In experiment 2, we determined the time course of attention allocation in relation to the emergence of the competitive benefit by manipulating the encoding duration of memorable and forgettable stimuli. The competitive benefit did not emerge until after there were differences in attention allocation, ruling out the possibility that the difference in attention allocation was caused by the competitive benefit within VWM. We speculate that the competitive benefit is a result of attentional differences between memorable and forgettable stimuli. Importantly, we find that attention can interact with stimulus memorability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

According to the desirable difficulty framework, effortful successful retrievals are more effective than easy successful retrievals for promoting long-term memory. Research has also shown the vital importance of relearning for more durable memory, but no previous study has specifically examined the effects of difficulty conditions for relearning. In the present study, 50 participants learned 18 nonwords in one session and then retrieved them in a relearning session the following day either forward (retrieving the target word), backward (retrieving the meaning), or by copying. Successful retrieval could be in the first attempt or in a later round following feedback. The results showed that success in Round 1 was a strong predictor of later retention, especially for forward relearning in the productive test. Forward relearning led to higher retention when the round of retrieval success was controlled, particularly for productive knowledge. However, backward relearning allowed more words to be retrieved in Round 1, culminating in no overall differences in retention between the two directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Most English word forms convey multiple meanings, that is, they are semantically ambiguous. A relatively small proportion of these ambiguous forms are homonyms that convey distinct meanings (e.g., bank may refer to a financial institution or the land bordering a river), while the majority are polysemes that convey interrelated senses (mouth may refer to the mouth of a person or a river). Empirical investigations have demonstrated an advantage for polysemous word forms across various lexical processing tasks, suggesting differences in the way they are organized in semantic memory. However, polysemous forms also tend to be more frequent, comprise fewer phonemes and syllables, and occur in more dense neighborhoods involving more similar sounding words. The nature and extent of these systematic polysemy-form mappings and their influence on processing have yet to be fully investigated. The present study reports an analysis of a corpus of English monomorphemic words (N = 4,466), confirming that phonological features predict a significant proportion of variance (16.8%) in the number of senses conveyed by a word. A series of experiments using relative weight analyses of megastudy data sets of word recognition and production tasks demonstrates that these systematic polysemy-form mappings have a relatively important influence on lexical processing compared to other lexical and semantic variables. These findings suggest that polysemous word forms might be structured systematically to minimize cognitive costs and maintain a compact or kernel lexicon. Implications for current accounts of lexical ambiguity based solely on semantic similarity are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).